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HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

No.  27 

SJiters  : 

HERBERT    FISHER,  M.A.,  P.B.A. 
Prof.  GILBERT  MURRAY,  Litt.D,, 

LL.D.,  F.B.A. 
Prof.  J.  ARTHUR    THOMSON,  M.A. 
Prof.  WILLIAM  T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


A  complete  dassified  list  of  the  volumes  of  The 
Home  University  Library  already  published 
will  be  found  at  the  back  of  this  book. 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

MODERN 


BY 

G.  H.  MAIR,  M.A. 

SOMETIME   SCHOLAR    OF   CHRIST   CHURCH 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY   HOLT  AND   COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS   AND    N  ORG  ATE 


Copyright,  1911, 

BY 

HENRY    HOLT   AND    COMPANY 


College 
library 


Hoi 
KZ8e 


PREFACE 

The  intention  of  this  book  is  to  lay  stress  on  ideas 
and  tendencies  that  have  to  be  understood  and  appre- 
ciated, rather  than  on  facts  that  have  to  be  learned  by 
heart.  Many  authors  are  not  mentioned  and  others 
receive  scanty  treatment,  because  of  the  necessities 
of  this  method  of  approach.  The  book  aims  at 
dealing  with  the  matter  of  authors  more  than  with 
their  lives ;  consequently  it  contains  few  dates.  All 
that  the  reader  need  require  to  help  him  have  been 
included  in  a  short  chronological  table  at  the  end. 

To  have  attempted  a  severely  ordered  and  analytic 
treatment  of  the  subject  would  have  been,  for  the 
author  at  least,  impossible  within  the  limits  imposed, 
and,  in  any  case,  would  have  been  foreign  to  the 
purpose  indicated  by  the  editors  of  the  Home  Uni- 
versity Library.  The  book  pretends  no  more  than 
to  be  a  general  introduction  to  a  very  great  subject, 
and  it  will  have  fulfilled  all  that  is  intended  for  it  if 
it  stimulates  those  who  read  it  to  set  about  reading 
for  themselves  the  books  of  which  it  treats. 

Its  debts  are  many,  its  chief  creditors  two  teachers. 
Professor  Grierson  at  Aberdeen  University  and  Sir 
Walter   Raleigh   at   Oxford,  to  the   stimulation   of 


ri6.'^iL^7 


vi  PREFACE 

whose  books  and  teaching  my  pleasure  in  EngUsh 
literature  and  any  understanding  I  have  of  it  are 
due.  To  them  and  to  the  other  writers  (chief  of 
them  Professor  Herford)  whose  ideas  I  have  wit- 
tingly or  unwittingly  incorporated  in  it,  as  well  as 
to  the  kindness  and  patience  of  Professor  Gilbert 
Murray,  I  wish  here  to  express  my  indebtedness. 

a.  H.  M. 

/ 
Manchesteh, 

Au^/ust,  1911. 


CONTENTS 


Preface ▼ 

Chap. 

I    The  Renaissakce 9 

II      EUZABETHAH    PoETBY   AND    PbOSE 99 

III  The  DRAiiA 56 

IV  The  Seventeenth  Century 80 

V    The  Aoe  of  Good  Sense 109 

VI    Dr.  Johnson  and  His  Time      ......  13T 

VII    The  Romantic  Revival 161 

VIII    The  Victorian  Age 190 

IX    The  Novel 212 

X    The  Present  Age 236 

Bibliography 251 

Chronological  Table 253 

Index 255 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE: 
MODERN 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  RENAISSANCE 

(1) 

There  are  times  in  every  man's  experience 
when  some  sudden  widening  of  the  boundaries 
of  his  knowledge,  some  vision  of  hitherto  untried 
and  unrealized  possibilities,  has  come  and  seemed 
to  bring  with  it  new  life  and  the  inspiration  of 
fresh  and  splendid  endeavour.  It  may  be  some 
great  book  read  for  the  first  time  not  as  a  book, 
but  as  a  revelation;  it  may  be  the  first  reaHzation 
of  the  extent  and  moment  of  what  physical  science 
has  to  teach  us;  it  may  be,  like  Carlyle's  "Ever- 
lasting Yea,"  an  ethical  illumination,  or  spiritual 
like  Augustine's  or  John  Wesley's.  But  whatever 
it  is,  it  brings  with  it  new  eyes,  new  powers 
of  comprehension,  and  seems  to  reveal  a  treasury 
of  latent  and  unsuspected  talents  in  the  mind  and 
heart.  The  history  of  mankind  has  its  parallels 
to  these  moments  of  illumination  in  the  life  of  the 
individual.  There  are  times  when  the  boundaries 
of  human  experience,  always  narrow,  and  fluctu- 
ating but  little  between  age  and  age,  suddenly 


10    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

widen  themselves,  and  the  spirit  of  man  leaps 
forward  to  possess  and  explore  its  new  domain. 
These  are  the  great  ages  of  the  world.  They 
could  be  counted,  perhaps,  on  one  hand.  The 
age  of  Pericles  in  Athens;  the  less  defined  age, 
when  Europe  passed,  spiritually  and  artistically, 
from  what  we  call  the  Dark,  to  what  we  call  the 
Middle  Ages;  the  Renaissance;  the  period  of 
the  French  Revolution.  Two  of  them,  so  far  as 
English  literature  is  concerned,  fall  within  the 
compass  of  this  book,  and  it  is  with  one  of  them — 
the  Renaissance — that  it  begins. 

It  is  as  difficult  to  find  a  comprehensive  for- 
mula for  what  the  Renaissance  meant  as  to  tie 
it  down  to  a  date.  The  year  1453  a.d.,  when 
the  Eastern  Empire — the  last  relic  of  the  con- 
tinuous spirit  of  Rome — fell  before  the  Turks, 
used  to  be  given  as  the  date,  and  perhaps  the 
word  "Renaissance"  itself — "a  new  birth" — is 
as  much  as  can  be  accomplished  shortly  by 
way  of  definition.  Michelet's  resonant  "discov- 
ery by  mankind  of  himself  and  of  the  world" 
rather  expresses  what  a  man  of  the  Renaissance 
himself  must  have  thought  it,  than  what  we  in 
this  age  can  declare  it  to  be.  But  both  endeavours 
to  date  and  to  define  are  alike  impossible.  One 
cannot  fix  a  term  to  day  or  night,  and  the  theory 
of  the  Renaissance  as  a  kind  of  tropical  dawn 
— a  sudden  passage  to  light  from  darkness — 
is  not  to  be  considered.  The  Renaissance  was, 
and  was  the  result  of,  a  numerous  and  various 
series  of  events  which  followed  and  accompanied 
one  another  from  the  fourteenth  to  the  begin- 
ning of  the  sixteenth  centuries.    First  and  most 


THE  RENAISSANCE  11 

immediate  in  its  influence  on  art  and  literature 
and  thought,  was  the  rediscovery  of  the  ancient 
literatures.  In  the  Middle  Ages  knowledge  of 
Greek  and  Latin  literatures  had  withdrawn  itself 
into  monasteries,  and  there  narrowed  till  of 
secular  Latin  writing  scarcely  any  knowledge 
remained  save  of  Vergil  (because  of  his  supposed 
Messianic  prophecy)  and  Statins,  and  of  Greek, 
except  Aristotle,  none  at  all.  What  had  been 
lost  in  the  Western  Empire,  however,  subsisted 
in  the  East,  and  the  continual  advance  of  the 
Turk  on  the  territories  of  the  Emperors  of  Con- 
stantinople drove  westward  to  the  shelter  of 
Italy  and  the  Church,  and  to  the  patronage  of 
the  Medicis,  a  crowd  of  scholars  who  brought 
with  them  their  manuscripts  of  Homer  and  the 
dramatists,  of  Thucydides  and  Herodotus,  and 
most  momentous  perhaps  for  the  age  to  come,  of 
Plato  and  Demosthenes  and  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment in  its  original  Greek.  The  quick  and  vivid 
intellect  of  Italy,  which  had  been  torpid  in  the 
decadence  of  medisevalism  and  its  mysticism 
and  piety,  seized  with  avidity  the  revelation  of 
the  classical  world  which  the  scholars  and  their 
manuscripts  brought.  Human  life,  which  the 
mediaeval  Church  had  taught  them  to  regard  but 
as  a  threshold  and  stepping-stone  to  eternity, 
acquired  suddenly  a  new  momentousness  and 
value;  the  promises  of  the  Church  paled  like  its 
lamps  at  sunrise;  and  a  new  paganism,  which  had 
Plato  for  its  high  priest,  and  Demosthenes  and 
Pericles  for  its  archetypes  and  examples,  ran 
like  wild-fire  through  Italy.  The  Greek  spirit 
seized  on  art,  and  produced  Raphael,  Leonardo, 


12    ENGLISH  LITERATUHE— MODERN 

and  Michel  Angelo;  on  literature  and  philosophy 
and  gave  us  Pico  della  Mirandula;  on  life  and 
gave  us  the  Medicis  and  Castiglione  and  Machi- 
avelli.  Then — the  invention  not  of  Italy  but  of 
Germany — came  the  art  of  printing,  and  made 
this  revival  of  Greek  literature  quickly  portable 
into  other  lands. 

Even  more  momentous  was  the  new  knowl- 
edge the  age  brought  of  the  physical  world.  The 
brilliant  conjectures  of  Copernicus  paved  the 
way  for  Galileo,  and  the  warped  and  narrow 
cosmology  which  conceived  the  earth  as  the  cen- 
tre of  the  universe,  suffered  a  blow  that  in  shaking 
it  shook  also  religion.  And  while  the  conjectures 
of  the  men  of  science  were  adding  regions  un- 
dreamt of  to  the  physical  universe,  the  discov- 
erers were  enlarging  the  territories  of  the  earth 
itself.  The  Portuguese,  with  the  aid  of  sailors 
trained  in  the  great  Mediterranean  ports  of 
Genoa  and  Venice,  pushed  the  track  of  explor- 
ation down  the  western  coast  of  Africa;  the 
Cape  was  circumnavigated  by  Vasco  da  Gama, 
and  India  reached  for  the  first  time  by  Western 
men  by  way  of  the  sea.  Columbus  reached 
Trinidad  and  discovered  the  "New"  World; 
his  successors  pushed  past  him  and  touched 
the  Continent.  Spanish  colonies  grew  up  along 
the  coasts  of  North  and  Central  America  and 
in  Peru,  and  the  Portuguese  reached  Brazil. 
Cabot  and  the  English  voyagers  reached  New- 
foundland and  Labrador;  the  French  made 
their  way  up  the  St.  Lawrence.  The  discovery 
of  the  gold  mines  brought  new  and  unimagined 
possibilities  of  wealth  to  the  Old  World,  while 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IS 

the  imagination  of  Europe,  bounded  since  the 
beginning  of  recorded  time  by  the  Western 
ocean,  and  with  the  Mediterranean  as  its  centre, 
shot  out  to  the  romance  and  mystery  of  untried 
seas. 

It  is  difficult  for  us  in  these  later  days  to 
conceive  the  profound  and  stirring  influence  of 
such  an  alteration  on  thought  and  literature. 
To  the  men  at  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century 
scarcely  a  year  but  brought  another  bit  of  re- 
ceived and  recognized  thinking  to  the  scrap- 
heap;  scarcely  a  year  but  some  new  discovery 
found  itself  surpassed  and  in  its  turn  discarded, 
or  lessened  in  significance  by  something  still 
more  new.  Columbus  sailed  westward  to  find  a 
new  sea  route,  and  as  he  imagined,  a  more  expe- 
ditious one  to  "the  Indies";  the  name  West 
Indies  still  survives  to  show  the  theory  on  which 
the  early  discoverers  worked.  The  rapidity  with 
which  knowledge  widened  can  be  gathered  by  a 
comparison  of  the  maps  of  the  day.  In  the 
earlier  of  them  the  mythical  Brazil,  a  relic  per- 
haps of  the  lost  Atlantis,  lay  a  regularly  and 
mystically  blue  island  oflE  the  west  coast  of  Ire- 
land; then  the  Azores  were  discovered  and  the 
name  fastened  on  to  one  of  the  islands  of  that 
archipelago.  Then  Amerigo  reached  South  Amer- 
ica and  the  name  became  finally  fixed  to  the 
country  that  we  know.  There  is  nothing  now- 
adays that  can  give  us  a  parallel  to  the  stirring 
and  exaltation  of  the  imagination  which  intoxi- 
cated the  men  of  the  Renaissance,  and  gave 
a  new  birth  to  thought  and  art.  The  great 
scientific  discoveries  of  the  nineteenth  century 


14  ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

came  to  men  more  prepared  for  the  shock  of  new 
surprises,  and  they  carried  evidence  less  tangible 
and  indisputable  to  the  senses.  Perhaps  if  the 
strivings  of  science  should  succeed  in  proving 
as  evident  and  comprehensible  the  existences 
which  spiritualist  and  psychical  research  is 
striving  to  establish,  we  should  know  the  thrill 
that  the  great  twin  discoverers,  Copernicus  and 
Columbus,  brought  to  Europe. 


(2) 

This  rough  sketch  of  the  Renaissance  has  been 
set  down  because  it  is  only  by  realizing  the  period 
in  its  largest  and  broadest  sense  that  we  can 
understand  the  beginnings  of  our  own  modern 
literature.  The  Renaissance  reached  England 
late.  By  the  time  that  the  impulse  was  at  its 
height  with  Spenser  and  Shakespeare,  it  had 
died  out  in  Italy,  and  in  France  to  which  in 
its  turn  Italy  had  passed  the  torch,  it  was 
already  a  waning  fire.  When  it  came  to  Eng- 
land it  came  in  a  special  form  shaped  by  polit- 
ical and  social  conditions,  and  by  the  accidents 
of  temperament  and  inclination  in  the  men  who 
began  the  movement.  But  the  essence  of  the 
inspiration  remained  the  same  as  it  had  been 
on  the  Continent,  and  the  twin  threads  of 
its  two  main  impulses,  the  impulse  from  the 
study  of  the  classics,  and  the  impulse  given  to 
men's  minds  by  the  voyages  of  discovery, 
run  through  all  the  texture  of  our  Renaissance 
literature. 


THE  RENAISSANCE  15 

Literature  as  it  developed  in  the  reign  of 
Elizabeth  ran  counter  to  the  hopes  and  desires 
of  the  men  who  began  the  movement;  the  com- 
mon usage  which  extends  the  term  Elizabethan 
backwards  outside  the  limits  of  the  reign  itself, 
has  nothing  but  its  carelessness  to  recommend 
it.  The  men  of  the  early  renaissance  in  the  reigns 
of  Edward  VT.  and  Mary,  belonged  to  a  graver 
school  than  their  successors.  They  were  no 
splendid  courtiers,  nor  daring  and  hardy  adven- 
turers, still  less  swashbucklers,  exquisites,  or 
literary  dandies.  Their  names — Sir  John  Cheke, 
Roger  Ascham,  Nicholas  Udall,  Thomas  Wilson, 
Walter  Haddon,  belong  rather  to  the  universi- 
ties and  to  the  coteries  of  learning,  than  to  the 
court.  To  the  nobility,  from  whose  essays  and 
belles  lettres  Elizabethan  poetry  was  to  develop, 
they  stood  in  the  relation  of  tutors  rather  than 
of  companions,  suspecting  the  extravagances  of 
their  pupils  rather  than  sympathising  with  their 
ideals.  They  were  a  band  of  serious  and  dignified 
scholars,  men  preoccupied  with  morality  and 
good-citizenship,  and  holding  those  as  worth 
more  than  the  lighter  interests  of  learning  and 
style.  It  is  perhaps  characteristic  of  the  English 
temper  that  the  revival  of  the  classical  tongues, 
which  in  Italy  made  for  paganism,  and  the  pur- 
suit of  pleasure  in  life  and  art,  in  England  brought 
with  it  in  the  first  place  a  new  seriousness  and 
gravity  of  life,  and  in  religion  the  Reformation. 
But  in  a  way  the  scholars  fought  against  tenden- 
cies in  their  age,  which  were  both  too  fast  and 
too  strong  for  them.  At  a  time  when  young 
men  were  writing  poetry  modelled  on  the  delicate 


16  ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

and  extravagant  verse  of  Italy,  were  reading 
Italian  novels,  and  affecting  Italian  fashions 
in  speech  and  dress,  they  were  fighting  for  sound 
education,  for  good  classical  scholarship,  for  the 
purity  of  native  English,  and  behind  all  these 
for  the  native  strength  and  worth  of  the  Eng- 
lish character,  which  they  felt  to  be  endangered 
by  orgies  of  reckless  assimilation  from  abroad. 
The  revival  of  the  classics  at  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge could  not  produce  an  Erasmus  or  a  Scali- 
ger;  we  have  no  fine  critical  scholarship  of  this 
age  to  put  beside  that  of  Holland  or  France. 
Sir  John  Cheke  and  his  followers  felt  they  had 
a  public  and  national  duty  to  perform,  and  their 
knowledge  of  the  classics  only  served  them  for 
examples  of  high  living  and  morality,  on  which 
education,  in  its  sense  of  the  formation  of  char- 
acter, could  be  based. 

The  literary  influence  of  the  revival  of  letters 
in  England,  apart  from  its  moral  influence, 
took  two  contradictory  and  opposing  forms. 
In  the  curricula  of  schools,  logic,  which  in  the 
Middle  Ages  had  been  the  groundwork  of  thought 
and  letters,  gave  place  to  rhetoric.  The  read- 
ing of  the  ancients  awakened  new  delight  in 
the  melody  and  beauty  of  language:  men  be- 
came intoxicated  with  words.  The  practice 
of  rhetoric  was  universal  and  it  quickly  coloured 
all  literature.  It  was  the  habit  of  the  rhetori- 
cians to  choose  some  subject  for  declamation 
and  round  it  to  encourage  their  pupils  to  set 
embellishments  and  decorations,  which  com- 
monly proceeded  rather  from  a  delight  in  language 
for  language's  sake,  than  from  any  effect  in  en- 


THE  RENAISSANCE  17 

forcing  an  argument.  Their  models  for  these 
exercises  can  be  traced  in  their  influence  on  later 
writers.  One  of  the  most  popular  of  them, 
Erasmus's  "Discourse  Persuading  a  Young 
Man  to  Marriage,"  which  was  translated  in  an 
English  text-book  of  rhetoric,  reminds  one  of 
the  first  part  of  Shakespeare's  sonnets.  The 
literary  affectation  called  euphuism  was  directly 
based  on  the  precepts  of  the  handbooks  on  rhet- 
oric; its  author,  John  Lyly,  only  elaborated  and 
made  more  precise  tricks  of  phrase  and  writing, 
which  had  been  used  as  exercises  in  the  schools 
of  his  youth.  The  prose  of  his  school,  with  its 
fantastic  delight  in  exuberance  of  figure  and 
sound,  owed  its  inspiration,  in  its  form  ulti- 
mately to  Cicero,  and  in  the  decorations  with 
which  it  was  embellished,  to  the  elder  Pliny  and 
later  writers  of  his  kind.  The  long  declamatory 
speeches  and  the  sententiousness  of  the  early 
^ama  were  directly  modelled  on  Seneca,  through 
whom  was  faintly  reflected  the  tragedy  of  Greece, 
unknown  directly  or  almost  unknown  to  Enghsh 
readers.  Latinism,  like  every  new  craze,  became 
a  passion,  and  ran  through  the  less  intelligent 
kinds  of  writing  in  a  wild  excess.  Not  much  of 
the  hterature  of  this  time  remains  in  common 
knowledge,  and  for  examples  of  these  affecta- 
tions one  must  turn  over  the  black  letter  pages 
of  forgotten  books.  There  high-sounding  and 
familiar  words  are  handled  and  bandied  about 
with  delight,  and  you  can  see  in  volume  after 
volume  these  minor  and  forgotten  authors  gloat- 
ing over  the  new  found  treasure  which  placed 
them  in  their  time  in  the  van  of  literary  success. 


18    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

That  they  are  obsolete  now,  and  indeed  were 
obsolete  before  they  were  dead,  is  a  warning 
to  authors  who  intend  similar  extravagances. 
Strangeness  and  exoticism  are  not  lasting  wares. 
By  the  time  of  "Love's  Labour  Lost"  they  had 
become  nothing  more  than  matter  for  laughter, 
and  it  is  only  through  their  reflection  and  dis- 
tortion in  Shakespeare's  pages  that  we  know 
them  now. 

Had  not  a  restraining  influence,  anxiously 
and  even  acrimoniously  urged,  broken  in  on 
their  endeavours  the  English  language  to-day 
might  have  been  almost  as  completely  latinized 
as  Spanish  or  Italian.  That  the  essential  Saxon 
purity  of  our  tongue  has  been  preserved  is  to 
the  credit  not  of  sensible  unlettered  people  es- 
chewing new  fashions  they  could  not  comprehend, 
but  to  the  scholars  themselves.  The  chief  ser- 
vice that  Cheke  and  Ascham  and  their  fellows 
rendered  to  English  Hterature  was  their  crusade 
against  the  exaggerated  latinity  that  they  had 
themselves  helped  to  make  possible,  the  crusade 
against  what  they  called  "inkhorn  terms."  "I 
am  of  this  opinion,"  said  Cheke  in  a  prefatory 
letter  to  a  book  translated  by  a  friend  of  his, 
"that  our  own  tongue  should  be  written  clean 
and  pure,  unmixed  and  unmangled  with  the 
borrowing  of  other  tongues,  wherein  if  we  take 
not  heed  by  time,  ever  borrowing  and  never  pay- 
ing, she  shall  be  fain  to  keep  her  house  as  bank- 
rupt." Writings  in  the  Saxon  vernacular  like  the 
sermons  of  Latimer,  who  was  careful  to  use  noth- 
ing not  familiar  to  the  common  people,  did  much 
to  help  the  scholars  to  save  our  prose  from  the 


THE  RENAISSANCE  19 

extravagances  which  they  dreaded.  Their  attack 
was  directed  no  less  against  the  revival  of  really 
obsolete  words.  It  is  a  paradox  worth  noting 
for  its  strangeness  that  the  first  revival  of  medi- 
aevalism  in  modern  English  literature  was  in 
the  Renaissance  itself.  Talking  in  studious 
archaism  seems  to  have  been  a  fashionable  prac- 
tice in  society  and  court  circles.  "The  fine 
courtier,"  says  Thomas  Wilson  in  his  Art  of 
Rhetoric,  "will  talk  nothing  but  Chaucer."  The 
scholars  of  the  English  Renaissance  fought  not 
only  against  the  ignorant  adoption  of  their  im- 
portations, but  against  the  renewal  of  forgotten 
habits  of  speech. 

Their  efforts  failed,  and  their  ideals  had  to 
wait  for  their  acceptance  till  the  age  of  Dryden, 
when  Shakespeare  and  Spenser  and  Milton, 
all  of  them  authors  who  consistently  violated 
the  standards  of  Cheke,  had  done  their  work.  The 
fine  courtier  who  would  talk  nothing  but  Chaucer 
was  in  Elizabeth's  reign  the  saving  of  English 
verse.  The  beauty  and  richness  of  Spenser 
is  based  directly  on  words  he  got  from  Troilus 
and  Cressida  and  the  Canterbury  Tales.  Some 
of  the  most  sonorous  and  beautiful  lines  in 
Shakespeare  break  every  canon  laid  down  by 
the  humanists. 

"When  the  extravagant  and  erring  spurit  hies  to  his  confine" 

is  a  line,  three  of  the  chief  words  of  which  are 
Latin  importations  that  come  unfamiliarly,  bear- 
ing their  original  interpretation  with  them. 
Milton  is  packed  with  similar  things:  he  will 
talk  of  a  crowded  meeting  as  "frequent"  and  use 


20    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

such  a  construction  as  "this  way  and  that  revolv- 
ing the  swift  mind,"  a  form  of  words  which  is  unin- 
teUigible  except  on  a  knowledge  of  Latin  syntax. 
Yet  the  effect  is  a  good  poetic  effect.  In  attack- 
ing latinisms  in  the  language  borrowed  from 
older  poets  Cheke  and  his  companions  were 
attacking  the  two  chief  sources  of  Elizabethan 
poetic  vocabulary.  All  the  sonorousness,  beauty 
and  dignity  of  the  poetry  and  the  drama  which 
followed  them  would  have  been  lost  had  they 
succeeded  in  their  object,  and  their  verse  would 
have  been  constrained  into  the  warped  and  ugly 
forms  of  Sternhold  and  Hopkins,  and  those 
with  them  who  composed  the  first  and  worst 
metrical  version  of  the  Psalms.  When  their 
idea  reappeared  for  its  fulfilment,  phantasy  and 
imagery  had  temporarily  worn  themselves  out, 
and  the  richer  language  made  simplicity  pos- 
sible and  adequate  for  poetry. 

There  are  other  directions  in  which  the  clas- 
sical revival  influenced  writing  that  need  not 
detain  us  here.  The  attempt  to  transplant 
classical  metres  into  English  verse  which  was 
the  concern  of  a  little  group  of  authors  who 
called  themselves  the  Areopagus  came  to  no 
more  success  than  a  similar  and  contemporary 
attempt  did  in  France.  An  earlier  and  more 
lasting  result  of  the  influence  of  the  classics  on 
new  ways  of  thinking  is  the  Utopia  of  Sir  Thomas 
More,  based  on  Plato's  Republic,  and  followed  by 
similar  attempts  on  the  part  of  other  authors, 
of  which  the  most  notable  are  Harrington's 
Oceana  and  Bacon's  New  Atlantis.  In  one  way 
or  another  the  rediscovery  of  Plato  proved  the 


THE  RENAISSANCE  £1 

most  valuable  part  of  the  Renaissance's  gift 
from  Greece.  The  doctrines  of  the  Symposium 
coloured  in  Italy  the  writings  of  Castiglione 
and  Mirandula.  In  England  they  gave  us  Spen- 
ser's "Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty,"  and  they 
affected,  each  in  his  owti  way,  Sir  Phihp  Sidney, 
and  others  of  the  circle  of  court  writers  of  his 
time.  More's  book  was  written  in  Latin,  though 
there  is  an  English  translation  almost  contempo- 
rary. He  combines  in  himself  the  two  strains 
that  we  found  working  in  the  Renaissance,  for 
besides  its  origin  in  Plato,  Utopia  owes  not  a 
little  to  the  influence  of  the  voyages  of  discovery. 
In  1507  there  was  published  a  little  book  called 
an  Introduction  to  Cosmography,  which  gave  an 
account  of  the  four  voyages  of  Amerigo.  In 
the  story  of  the  fourth  voyage  it  is  narrated 
that  twenty-four  men  were  left  in  a  fort  near 
Cape  Bahia.  More  used  this  detail  as  a  starting- 
point,  and  one  of  the  men  whom  Amerigo  left 
tells  the  story  of  this  "Nowhere,"  a  republic 
partly  resembling  England  but  most  of  all  the 
ideal  world  of  Plato.  Partly  resembling  England, 
because  no  man  can  escape  from  the  influences 
of  his  own  time,  whatever  road  he  takes,  whether 
the  road  of  imagination  or  any  other.  His  im- 
agination can  only  build  out  of  the  materials 
afforded  him  by  his  own  experience:  he  can 
alter,  he  can  rearrange,  but  he  cannot  in  the 
strictest  sense  of  the  word  create,  and  every 
city  of  dreams  is  only  the  scheme  of  things  as 
they  are  remoulded  nearer  to  the  desire  of  a 
man's  heart.  In  a  way  More  has  less  invention 
than  some  of  his  subtler  followers,  but  his  book 


22    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

is  interesting  because  it  is  the  first  example  of 
a  kind  of  writing  which  has  been  attractive  to 
many  men  since  his  time,  and  particularly  to 
writers  of  our  own  day. 

There  remains  one  circumstance  in  the  revival 
of  the  classics  which  had  a  marked  and  con- 
tinuous influence  on  the  literary  age  that  fol- 
lowed. To  get  the  classics  English  scholars 
had  as  we  have  seen  to  go  to  Italy.  Cheke  went 
there  and  so  did  Wilson,  and  the  path  of  travel 
across  France  and  through  Lombardy  to  Florence 
and  Rome  was  worn  hard  by  the  feet  of  their 
followers  for  over  a  hundred  years  after.  On 
the  heels  of  the  men  of  learning  went  the  men  of 
fashion,  eager  to  learn  and  copy  the  new  man- 
ners of  a  society  whose  moral  teacher  was  Machia- 
velli,  and  whose  patterns  of  splendour  were  the 
courts  of  Florence  and  Ferrara,  and  to  learn 
the  trick  of  verse  that  in  the  hands  of  Petrarch 
and  his  followers  had  fashioned  the  sonnet  and 
other  new  lyric  forms.  This  could  not  be  with- 
out its  influence  on  the  manners  of  the  nation, 
and  the  scholars  who  had  been  the  first  to  show 
the  way  were  the  first  to  deplore  the  pell-mell 
assimilation  of  Italian  manners  and  vices,  which 
was  the  unintended  result  of  the  inroad  on 
insularity  which  had  already  begun.  They  saw 
the  danger  ahead,  and  they  laboured  to  meet 
it  as  it  came.  Ascham  in  his  Schoolmaster  railed 
against  the  translation  of  Italian  books,  and 
the  corrupt  manners  of  living  and  false  ideas 
which  they  seemed  to  him  to  breed.  The  Ital- 
ianate  Englishman  became  the  chief  part  of  the 
stock-in-trade  of  the  satirists  and  moralists  of 


THE  RENAISSANCE  93 

the  day.  Stubbs,  a  Puritan  chronicler,  whose 
book  The  Anatomy  of  Abuses  is  a  valuable  aid  to 
the  study  of  Tudor  social  history,  and  Harrison, 
whose  description  of  England  prefaces  Holin- 
shed's  Chronicles,  both  deal  in  detail  with  the 
Italian  menace,  and  condemn  in  good  set  terms 
the  costliness  in  dress  andj  the  looseness  in 
morals  which  they  laid  to  its  charge.  Indeed, 
the  effect  on  England  was  profound,  and  it 
lasted  for  more  than  two  generations.  The 
romantic  traveller,  Coryat,  writing  well  within 
the  seventeenth  century  in  praise  of  the  luxuries 
of  Italy  (among  which  he  numbers  forks  for 
table  use),  is  as  enthusiastic  as  the  authors  who 
began  the  imitation  of  Italian  metres  in  Tottel's 
Miscellany,  and  Donne  and  Hall  in  their  satires 
written  under  James  wield  the  rod  of  censure 
as  sternly  as  had  Ascham  a  good  half  century 
before.  No  doubt  there  was  something  in  the 
danger  they  dreaded,  but  the  evil  was  not  un- 
mixed with  good,  for  insularity  will  always  be 
an  enemy  of  good  literature.  The  Elizabethans 
learned  much  more  than  their  plots  from  Italian 
models,  and  the  worst  effects  dreaded  by  the 
patriots  never  reached  our  shores.  Italian  vice 
stopped  short  of  real  life;  poisoning  and  hired 
ruffianism  flourished  only  on  the  stage. 


(3) 

The  influence  of  the  spirit  of  discovery  and 
adventure,  though  it  is  less  quickly  marked, 
more  pervasive,  and  less  easy  to  define,  is  per- 


24    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

haps  more  universal  than  that  of  the  classics 
or  of  the  Italian  fashions  which  came  in  their 
train.  It  runs  right  through  the  literature  of 
Elizabeth's  age  and  after  it,  affecting,  each  in 
their  special  way,  all  the  dramatists,  authors 
who  were  also  adventurers  like  Raleigh,  scholars 
like  Milton,  and  philosophers  like  Hobbes  and 
Locke.  It  reappears  in  the  Romantic  revival 
with  Coleridge,  whose  "Ancient  Mariner"  owes 
much  to  reminiscences  of  his  favourite  reading 
— Purchas,  his  Pilgrimes,  and  other  old  books 
of  voyages.  The  matter  of  this  too-little  noticed 
strain  in  English  literature  would  suffice  to  fill 
a  whole  book;  only  a  few  of  the  main  lines  of  its 
influence  can  be  noted  here. 

For  the  English  Renaissance — for  Elizabeth's 
England,  action  and  imagination  went  hand 
in  hand;  the  dramatists  and  poets  held  up  the 
mirror  to  the  voyagers.  In  a  sense,  the  cult 
of  the  sea  is  the  oldest  note  in  English  literature. 
There  is  not  a  poem  in  Anglo-Saxon  but  breathes 
the  saltness  and  the  bitterness  of  the  sea-air. 
To  the  old  English  the  sea  was  something  inex- 
pressibly melancholy  and  desolate,  mist-shrouded, 
and  lonely,  terrible  in  its  grey  and  shivering 
spaces;  and  their  tone  about  it  is  always  elegiac 
and  plaintive,  as  a  place  of  dreary  spiritless 
wandering  and  unmarked  graves.  When  the 
English  settled  they  lost  the  sense  of  the  sea; 
they  became  a  little  parochial  people,  tilling 
fields  and  tending  cattle,  wool-gathering  and 
wool-bartering,  their  shipping  confined  to  cross- 
Channel  merchandise,  and  coastwise  sailing 
from  port  to  port.     Chaucer's  shipman,  almost 


THE  RENAISSANCE  25 

the  sole  representative  of  the  sea  in  mediseval 
English  literature,  plied  a  coastwise  trade.  But 
with  the  Cabots  and  their  followers,  Frobisher 
and  Gilbert  and  Drake  and  Hawkins,  all  this 
was  changed;  once  more  the  ocean  became  the 
highway  of  our  national  progress  and  adventure, 
and  by  virtue  of  our  shipping  we  became  com- 
petitors for  the  dominion  of  the  earth.  The 
rising  tide  of  national  enthusiasm  and  exaltation 
that  this  occasioned  flooded  popular  literature. 
The  voyagers  themselves  wrote  down  the  stories 
of  their  adventures;  and  collections  of  these — 
Hakluyt's  and  Purchas's — were  among  the  most 
popular  books  of  the  age.  To  them,  indeed, 
we  must  look  for  the  first  beginnings  of  our 
modern  English  prose,  and  some  of  its  noblest 
passages.  The  writers,  as  often  as  not,  were 
otherwise  utterly  unknown — ship's  pursers,  super- 
cargoes, and  the  like — men  without  much  hterary 
craft  or  training,  whose  style  is  great  because  of 
the  greatness  of  their  subject,  because  they  had 
no  literary  artifices  to  stand  between  them  and 
the  plain  and  direct  telling  of  a  stirring  tale. 
But  the  ferment  worked  outside  the  actual 
doings  of  the  voyagers  themselves,  and  it  can  be 
traced  beyond  definite  allusions  to  them.  Allu- 
sions, indeed,  are  surprisingly  few;  Drake  is 
scarcely  as  much  as  mentioned  among  the  greater 
writers  of  the  age.  None  the  less  there  is  not 
one  of  them  that  is  not  deeply  touched  by  his 
spirit  and  that  of  the  movement  which  he  led. 
New  lands  had  been  discovered,  new  territories 
opened  up,  wonders  exposed  which  were  perhaps 
only  the  first  fruits  of  greater  wonders  to  come. 


26    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

Spenser  makes  the  voyagers  his  warrant  for  his 
excursion  into  fairyland.  Some,  he  says,  have 
condemned  his  fairy  world  as  an  idle  fiction. 

"But  let  that  man  with  better  sense  advise; 
That  of  the  world  least  part  to  us  is  red; 
And  daily  how  through  hardy  enterprise 
Many  great  regions  are  discovered. 
Which  to  late  age  were  never  mentioned. 
Who  ever  heard  of  the  *  Indian  Peru '  ? 
Or  who  in  venturous  vessel  measured 
The  Amazon,  huge  river,  now  found  true? 
Or  fruitfullest  Virginia  who  did  ever  view? 

"  Yet  all  these  were,  when  no  man  did  them  know. 
Yet  have  from  wiser  ages  hidden  been; 
And  later  times  things  more  unknown  shall  show." 

It  is  in  the  drama  that  this  spirit  of  adventure 
caught  from  the  voyagers  gets  its  full  play. 
"Without  the  voyagers,"  says  Professor  Walter 
Raleigh,^  "Marlowe  is  inconceivable.'"  His  im- 
agination in  every  one  of  his  plays  is  preoccupied 
with  the  lust  of  adventure,  and  the  wealth  and 
power  adventure  brings.  Tamburlaine,  Eastern 
conqueror  though  he  is,  is  at  heart  an  English- 
man of  the  school  of  Hawkins  and  Drake.  Indeed 
the  comparison  must  have  occurred  to  his  own 
age,  for  a  historian  of  the  day,  the  antiquary 
Stow,  declares  Drake  to  have  been  "as  famous 
in  Europe  and  America  as  Tamburlaine  was  in 
Asia  and  Africa."  The  high-sounding  names 
and  quests  which  seem  to  us  to  give  the  play 
an  air  of  unreality  and  romance  were  to  the 
Elizabethans  real  and  actual;    things  as  strange 

^  To  whose  terminal  essay  in  "Hakluyt's  Voyages"  (Macle- 
hose)  I  am  indebted  for  much  of  the  matter  in  this  section. 


THE  RENAISSANCE  «7 

and  foreign  were  to  be  heard  any  day  amongst 
the  motley  crowd  in  the  Bankside  outside  the 
theatre  door.  Tamburlaine's  last  speech,  when 
he  calls  for  a  map  and  points  the  way  to  un- 
realised conquests,  is  the  very  epitome  of  the 
age  of  discovery. 

"Lo,  here  my  sons,  are  all  the  golden  mines. 
Inestimable  wares  and  precious  stones. 
More  worth  than  Asia  and  all  the  world  beside; 
And  from  the  Antarctic  Pole  eastward  behold 
As  much  more  land,  which  never  was  descried. 
Wherein  are  rocks  of  pearl  that  shine  as  bright 
As  all  the  lamps  that  beautify  the  sky." 

It  is  the  same  in  his  other  plays.  Dr.  Faustus 
assigns  to  his  serviceable  spirits  tasks  that  might 
have  been  studied  from  the  books  of  Hakluyt. 

"I  '11  have  them  fly  to  India  for  gold. 
Ransack  the  ocean  for  orient  pearl. 
And  search  all  comers  of  the  new  round  world 
For  pleasant  fruits  and  princely  delicates." 

When  there  is  no  actual  expression  of  the 
spirit  of  adventure,  the  ,air  of  the  sea  which  it 
carried  with  it  still  blows.  Shakespeare,  save 
for  his  scenes  in  The  Tempest  and  in  Pericles, 
which  seize  in  all  its  dramatic  poignancy  the 
terror  of  storm  and  shipwreck,  has  nothing 
dealing  directly  with  the  sea  or  with  travel; 
but  it  comes  out,  none  the  less,  in  figure  and 
metaphor,  and  plays  like  the  Merchant  of  Venice 
and  Othello  testify  to  his  accessibility  to  its  spirit. 
Milton,  a  scholar  whose  mind  was  occupied  by 
other  and  more  ultimate  matters,  is  full  of  allu- 
sions to  it.  Satan's  journey  through  Chaos  in 
Paradise  Lost  is  the  occasion  for  a  whole  series  of 


28    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

metaphors  drawn  from    seafaring.     In   Samson 
Agonistes  Dalila  comes  in, 

"  Like  a  stately  ship  .    .    . 
With  all  her  bravery  on  and  tackle  trim 
Sails  frilled  and  streamers  waving 
Courted  by  all  the  winds  that  hold  them  play." 

and  Samson  speaks  of  himself  as  one  who, 

"Like  a  foolish  pilot  have  shipwracked 
My  vessel  trusted  to  me  from  above 
Gloriously  rigged." 

The  influence  of  the  voyages  of  discovery 
persisted  long  after  the  first  bloom  of  the  Re- 
naissance had  flowered  and  withered.  On  the 
reports  brought  home  by  the  voyagers  were 
founded  in  part  those  conceptions  of  the  con- 
dition of  the  "natural"  man  which  form  such 
a  large  part  of  the  philosophic  discussions  of  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries.  Hobbes's 
description  of  the  life  of  nature  as  "nasty, 
solitary,  brutish,  and  short,"  Locke's  theories 
of  civil  government,  and  eighteenth  century 
speculators  like  Monboddo  all  took  as  the  basis 
of  their  theory  the  observations  of  the  men  of 
travel.  Abroad  this  connection  of  travellers  and 
philosophers  was  no  less  intimate.  Both  Mon- 
tesquieu and  Rousseau  owed  much  to  the  tales 
of  the  Iroquois,  the  North  American  Indian  allies 
of  France.  Locke  himself  is  the  best  example  of 
the  closeness  of  this  alliance.  He  was  a  diligent 
student  of  the  texts  of  the  voyagers,  and  himself 
edited  out  of  Hakluyt  and  Purchas  the  best 
collection  of  them  current  in  his  day.  The 
purely  literary  influence  of  the  age  of  discovery 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY  &  PROSE    29 

persisted  down  to  Robinson  Crusoe;  in  that  book 
by  a  refinement  of  satire  a  return  to  travel  itself 
(it  must  be  remembered  Defoe  posed  not  as  a 
novelist  but  as  an  actual  traveller)  is  used  to 
make  play  with  the  deductions  founded  on  it. 
Crusoe's  conversation  with  the  man  Friday  will 
be  found  to  be  a  satire  of  Locke's  famous  contro- 
versy with  the  Bishop  of  Worcester.  With  Robin- 
son  Crusoe  the  influence  of  the  age  of  discovery 
finally  perishes.  An  inspiration  hardens  into  the 
mere  subject  matter  of  books  of  adventure.  We 
need  not  follow  it  further. 


CHAPTER  II 

ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE 
(1) 

To  understand  Elizabethan  literature  it  is 
necessary  to  remember  that  the  social  status  it 
enjoyed  was  far  different  from  that  of  literature 
in  our  own  day.  The  splendours  of  the  Medicis 
in  Italy  had  set  up  an  ideal  of  courtliness,  in 
which  letters  formed  an  integral  and  indispen- 
sable part.  For  the  Renaissance,  the  man  of 
letters  was  ordy  one  aspect  of  the  gentleman,  and 
the  true  gentleman,  as  books  so  early  and  late 
respectively  as  Castiglione's  Courtier  and  Peach- 
am's  Complete  Gentleman  show,  numbered  poetry 
as  a  necessary  part  of  his  accomplishments.  In 
England   special    circumstances    intensified   this 


80    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

tendency  of  the  time.  The  queen  was  unmarried: 
she  was  the  first  single  woman  to  wear  the  English 
crown,  and  her  vanity  made  her  value  the  de- 
votion of  the  men  about  her  as  something  more 
intimate  than  mere  loyalty  or  patriotism.  She 
loved  personal  homage,  particularly  the  homage 
of  half -amatory  eulogy  in  prose  and  verse.  It 
followed  that  the  ambition  of  every  courtier  was 
to  be  an  author,  and  of  every  author  to  be  a 
courtier;  in  fact,  outside  the  drama,  which  was 
almost  the  only  popular  writing  at  the  time, 
every  author  was  in  a  greater  or  less  degree  at- 
tached to  the  court.  If  they  were  not  enjoying 
its  favours  they  were  pleading  for  them,  mingling 
high  and  fantastic  compliment  with  bitter  re- 
proaches and  a  tale  of  misery.  And  consequently 
both  the  poetry  and  the  prose  of  the  time  are  re- 
stricted in  their  scope  and  temper  to  the  artificial 
and  romantic,  to  high-flown  eloquence,  to  the  cel- 
ebration of  love  and  devotion,  or  to  the  inculca- 
tion of  those  courtly  virtues  and  accomplishments 
which  composed  the  perfect  pattern  of  a  gentle- 
man. Not  that  there  was  not  both  poetry  and 
prose  written  outside  this  charmed  circle.  The 
pamphleteers  and  chroniclers,  Dekker  and  Nash, 
Holinshed  and  Harrison  and  Stow,  were  setting 
down  their  histories  and  descriptions,  and  pen- 
ning those  detailed  and  realistic  indictments  of 
the  follies  and  extravagances  of  fashion,  which 
together  with  the  comedies  have  enabled  us 
to  picture  accurately  the  England  and  especially 
the  London  of  Elizabeth's  reign.  There  was 
fine  poetry  written  by  Marlowe  and  Chapman 
as  well  as  by  Sidney  and  Spenser,  but  the  court 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    31 

was  still  the  main  centre  of  literary  endeavour, 
and  the  main  incitement  to  literary  fame  and 
success. 

But  whether  an  author  was  a  courtier  or  a 
Londoner  living  by  his  wits,  writing  was  never 
the  main  business  of  his  life:  all  the  writers  of 
the  time  were  in  one  way  or  another  men  of 
action  and  affairs.  As  late  as  Milton  it  is  probably 
true  to  say  that  writing  was  in  the  case  even  of 
the  greatest  an  avocation,  something  indulged 
in  at  leisure  outside  a  man's  main  business.  All 
the  Elizabethan  authors  had  crowded  and  various 
careers.  Of  Sir  Philip  Sidney  his  earliest  biog- 
rapher says,  "The  truth  is  his  end  was  not  writing, 
even  while  he  WTote,  but  both  his  wit  and  under- 
standing bent  upon  his  heart  to  make  himself 
and  others  not  in  words  or  opinion  but  in  life  and 
action  good  and  great."  Ben  Jonson  was  in 
turn  a  soldier,  a  poet,  a  bricklayer,  an  actor, 
and  ultimately  the  first  poet  laureate.  Lodge, 
after  leaving  Oxford,  passed  through  the  various 
professions  of  soldiering,  medicine,  playwriting, 
and  fiction,  and  he  wrote  his  novel  Rosalind,  on 
which  Shakespeare  based  As  You  Like  It,  while 
he  was  sailing  on  a  piratical  venture  on  the  Span- 
ish Main.  This  connection  between  life  and 
action  affected  as  we  have  seen  the  tone  and 
quality  of  Elizabethan  writing.  "All  the  dis- 
tinguished writers  of  the  period,"  says  Thoreau, 
"possess  a  greater  vigour  and  naturalness  than 
the  more  modern  .  .  .  you  have  constantly  the 
warrant  of  life  and  experience  in  what  you  read. 
The  little  that  is  said  is  eked  out  by  implication 
of  the  much  that  was  done."    In  another  passage 


32    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

the  same  writer  explains  the  strength  and  fine- 
ness of  the  writings  of  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  by  this 
very  test  of  action,  "the  word  which  is  best  said 
came  nearest  to  not  being  spoken  at  all,  for  it 
is  cousin  to  a  deed  which  the  speaker  could  have 
better  done.  Nay  almost  it  must  have  taken 
the  place  of  a  deed  by  some  urgent  necessity, 
even  by  some  misfortune,  so  that  the  truest 
writer  will  be  some  captive  knight  after  all." 
This  bond  between  literature  and  action  explains 
more  than  the  writings  of  the  voyagers  or  the 
pamphlets  of  men  who  lived  in  London  by  what 
they  could  make  of  their  fellows.  Literature  has 
always  a  two-fold  relation  to  life  as  it  is  lived. 
It  is  both  a  mirror  and  an  escape:  in  our  own 
day  the  stirring  romances  of  Stevenson,  the  full- 
blooded  and  vigorous  life  which  beats  through 
the  pages  of  Mr.  Kipling,  the  conscious  brutalism 
of  such  writers  as  Mr.  Conrad  and  Mr.  Hewlett, 
the  plays  of  J.  M.  Synge,  occupied  with  the 
vigorous  and  coarse-grained  life  of  tinkers  and 
peasants,  are  all  in  their  separate  ways  a  re- 
action against  an  age  in  which  the  overwhelming 
majority  of  men  and  women  have  sedentary 
pursuits.  Just  in  the  same  way  the  Elizabethan 
who  passed  his  commonly  short  and  crowded  life 
in  an  atmosphere  of  throat-cutting  and  powder 
and  shot,  and  in  a  time  when  affairs  of  state 
were  more  momentous  for  the  future  of  the  na- 
tion than  they  have  ever  been  since,  needed 
his  escape  from  the  things  which  pressed  in 
upon  him  every  day.  So  grew  the  vogue  and 
popularity  of  pastoral  poetry  and  the  pastoral 
romance. 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    38 

(2) 

It  is  with  two  courtiers  that  modem  English 
poetry  begins.  The  lives  of  Sir  Thomas  Wyatt 
and  the  Earl  of  Surrey  both  ended  early  and 
unhappily,  and  it  was  not  until  ten  years  after 
the  death  of  the  second  of  them  that  their  poems 
appeared  in  print.  The  book  that  contained 
them,  Tottel's  Miscellany  of  Songs  and  Sonnets, 
is  one  of  the  landmarks  of  English  literature. 
It  begins  lyrical  love  poetry  in  our  language. 
It  begins,  too,  the  imitation  and  adaptation  of 
foreign  and  chiefly  Italian  metrical  forms,  many 
of  which  have  since  become  characteristic  forms 
of  English  verse:  so  characteristic,  that  we 
scarcely  think  of  them  as  other  than  native  in 
origin.  To  Wyatt  belongs  the  honour  of  intro- 
ducing the  sonnet,  and  to  Surrey  the  more  momen- 
tous credit  of  writing,  for  the  first  time  in  English, 
blank  verse.  Wyatt  fills  the  most  important 
place  in  the  Miscellany,  and  his  work,  experimen- 
tal in  tone  and  quality,  formed  the  example  which 
Surrey  and  minor  writers  in  the  same  volume 
and  all  the  later  poets  of  the  age  copied.  He 
tries  his  hand  at  everything — songs,  madrigals, 
elegies,  complaints,  and  sonnets — and  he  takes 
his  models  from  both  ancient  Rome  and  modern 
Italy.  Indeed  there  is  scarcely  anything  in  the 
volume  for  which  with  some  trouble  and  research 
one  might  not  find  an  original  in  Petrarch,  or 
in  the  poets  of  Italy  who  followed  him.  But 
imitation,  universal  though  it  is  in  his  work, 
does  not  altogether  crowd  out  originality  of 
feeling  and  poetic  temper.    At  times,  he  sounds 


34    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

a  personal  note,  his  joy  on  leaving  Spain  for 
England,  his  feelings  in  the  Tower,  his  life  at 
the  Court  amongst  his  books,  and  as  a  country 
gentleman  enjoying  hunting  and  other  outdoor 
sports. 

"This  maketh  me  at  home  to  hunt  and  hawk. 
And  in  foul  weather  at  my  book  to  sit. 
In  frost  and  snow,  then  with  my  bow  to  stalk. 
No  man  does  mark  whereas  I  ride  or  go: 
In  lusty  leas  at  liberty  I  walk." 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  poetry  as  a  melodious 
and  enriched  expression  of  a  man's  own  feelings 
is  in  its  infancy  here.  The  new  poets  had  to  find 
their  own  language,  to  enrich  with  borrowings 
from  other  tongues  the  stock  of  words  suitable 
for  poetry  which  the  dropping  of  inflection  had 
left  to  English.  Wyatt  was  at  the  beginning  of 
the  process,  and  apart  from  a  gracious  and 
courtly  temper,  his  work  has,  it  must  be  con- 
fessed, hardly  more  than  an  antiquarian  interest. 
Surrey,  it  is  possible  to  say  on  reading  his  work, 
went  one  step  further.  He  allows  himself  oftener 
the  luxury  of  a  reference  to  personal  feelings, 
and  his  poetry  contains  from  place  to  place  a 
fairly  full  record  of  the  vicissitudes  of  his  life.  A 
prisoner  at  Windsor,  he  recalls  his  childhood  there. 

"The  large  green  courts  where  we  were  wont  to  hove. 
The  palme-play,  where,  despoiled  for  the  game. 
With  dazzled  eyes  oft  we  by  gleams  of  love 
Have  missed  the  ball,  and  got  sight  of  our  dame." 

Like  Wyatt's,  his  verses  are  poor  stuff,  but 
a  sympathetic  ear  can  catch  in  them  something 
of  the  accent  that  distinguishes  the  verse  of 
Sidney  and  Spenser.    He  is  greater  than  Wyatt, 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    35 

not  so  much  for  greater  skill  as  for  more  boldness 
in  experiment.  Wyatt  in  his  sonnets  had  used 
the  Petrarchan  or  Italian  form,  the  form  used 
later  in  England  by  Milton  and  in  the  nineteenth 
century  by  Rossetti.  He  built  up  each  poem, 
that  is,  in  two  parts,  the  octave,  a  two-rhymed 
section  of  eight  lines  at  the  beginning,  followed 
by  the  sestet,  a  six  line  close  with  three  rhymes. 
The  form  fits  itself  very  well  to  the  double  mood 
which  commonly  inspires  a  poet  using  the  sonnet 
form;  the  second  section  as  it  were  both  echoing 
and  answering  the  first,  following  doubt  with 
hope,  or  sadness  with  resignation,  or  resolving 
a  problem  set  itself  by  the  heart.  Surrey  tried 
another  manner,  the  manner  which  by  its  use  in 
Shakespeare's  sonnets  has  come  to  be  regarded 
as  the  English  form  of  this  kind  of  lyric.  His 
sonnets  are  virtually  three  stanza  poems  \^^th  a 
couplet  for  close,  and  he  allows  himself  as  many 
rhymes  as  he  chooses.  The  structure  is  obviously 
easier,  and  it  gives  a  better  chance  to  an  inferior 
workman,  but  in  the  hands  of  a  master  its  har- 
monies are  no  less  delicate,  and  its  capacity  to 
represent  changing  modes  of  thought  no  less 
complete  than  those  of  the  true  form  of  Petrarch. 
Blank  verse,  which  was  Surrey's  other  gift  to 
English  poetry,  was  in  a  way  a  compromise 
between  the  two  sources  from  which  the  Eng- 
lish Renaissance  drew  its  inspiration.  Latin 
and  Greek  verse  is  quantitative  and  rhymeless; 
Italian  verse,  built  up  on  the  metres  of  the  trouba- 
dours and  the  degeneration  of  Latin  which  gave 
the  world  the  Romance  languages,  used  many 
elaborate  forms   of  rhyme.     Blank  verse  took 


36    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

from  Latin  its  rhymelessness,  but  it  retained  ac- 
cent instead  of  quantity  as  the  basis  of  its  line. 
The  line  Surrey  used  is  the  five-foot  or  ten-syl- 
lable line  of  what  is  called  "heroic  verse" — the 
line  used  by  Chaucer  in  his  Prologue  and  most 
of  his  tales.  Like  Milton  he  deplored  rhyme  as 
the  invention  of  a  barbarous  age,  and  no  doubt 
he  would  have  rejoiced  to  go  further  and  banish 
accent  as  well  as  rhymed  endings.  That,  how- 
ever, was  not  to  be,  though  in  the  best  blank 
verse  of  later  time  accent  and  quantity  both 
have,  their  share  in  the  effect.  The  instrument 
he  forged  passed  into  the  hands  of  the  drama- 
tists: Marlowe  perfected  its  rhythm,  Shakespeare 
broke  its  monotony  and  varied  its  cadences  by 
altering  the  spacing  of  the  accents,  and  occa- 
sionally by  adding  an  extra  unaccented  syllable. 
It  came  back  from  the  drama  to  poetry  with 
Milton.  His  blindness  and  the  necessity  under 
which  it  laid  him  of  keeping  in  his  head  long 
stretches  of  verse  at  one  time,  because  he  could 
not  look  back  to  see  what  he  had  written,  probably 
helped  his  naturally  quick  and  delicate  sense  of 
cadence  to  vary  the  pauses,  so  that  a  variety 
of  accent  and  interval  might  replace  the  valuable 
aid  to  memory  which  he  put  aside  in  putting 
aside  rhyme.  Perhaps  it  is  to  two  accidents, 
the  accident  by  which  blank  verse  as  the  medium 
of  the  actor  had  to  be  retained  easily  in  the 
memory,  and  the  accident  of  Milton's  blindness, 
that  must  be  laid  the  credit  of  more  than  a  little 
of  the  richness  of  rhythm  of  this,  the  chief  and 
greatest  instrument  of  English  verse. 
The  imitation  of  Italian  and  French  forms 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    37 

which  Wyatt  and  Surrey  began,  was  continued 
by  a  host  of  younger  amateurs  of  poetry.  Labo- 
rious research  has  indeed  found  a  Continental 
original  for  almost  every  great  poem  of  the  time, 
and  for  very  many  forgotten  ones  as  well.  It  is 
easy  for  the  student  engaged  in  this  kind  of 
literary  exploration  to  exaggerate  the  importance 
of  what  he  finds,  and  of  late  years  criticism, 
written  mainly  by  these  explorers,  has  tended 
to  assume  that  since  it  can  be  found  that  Sidney, 
and  Daniel,  and  Watson,  and  all  the  other  writers 
of  mythological  peotry  and  sonnet  sequences 
took  their  ideas  and  their  phrases  from  foreign 
poetry,  their  work  is  therefore  to  be  classed 
merely  as  imitative  literary  exercise,  that  it  is 
frigid,  that  it  contains  or  conveys  no  real  feeling, 
and  that  except  in  the  secondary  and  derived 
sense,  it  is  not  really  lyrical  at  all.  Petrarch, 
they  will  tell  you,  may  have  felt  deeply  and 
sincerely  about  Laura,  but  when  Sidney  uses 
Petrarch's  imagery  and  even  translates  his  words 
in  order  to  express  his  feelings  for  Stella,  he 
is  only  a  plagiarist  and  not  a  lover,  and  the 
passion  for  Lady  Rich  which  is  supposed  to  have 
inspired  his  sonnets,  nothing  more  than  a  not 
too  seriously  intended  trick  to  add  the  excite- 
ment of  a  transcript  of  real  emotion  to  what  was 
really  an  academic  exercise.  If  that  were  indeed 
so,  then  EHzabethan  poetry  is  a  very  much  lesser 
and  meaner  thing  than  later  ages  have  thought 
it.  But  is  it  so?  Let  us  look  into  the  matter  a 
little  more  closely.  The  unit  of  all  ordinary 
kinds  of  writing  is  the  word,  and  one  is  not 
commonly  quarrelled  with  for  using  words  that 


38    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

have  belonged  to  other  people.  But  the  unit 
of  the  lyric,  like  the  unit  of  spoken  conversation, 
is  not  the  word  but  the  phrase.  Now  in  daily 
human  intercourse  the  use,  which  is  universal  and 
habitual,  of  set  forms  and  phrases  of  talk  is  not 
commonly  supposed  to  detract  from,  or  destroy 
sincerity.  In  the  crises  indeed  of  emotion  it 
must  be  most  people's  experience  that  the  natural 
speech  that  rises  unbidden  and  easiest  to  the  lips 
is  something  quite  familiar  and  commonplace, 
some  form  which  the  accumulated  experience  of 
many  generations  of  separate  people  has  found 
best  for  such  circumstances  or  such  an  occasion. 
The  lyric  is  just  in  the  position  of  conversation, 
at  such  a  heightened  and  emotional  moment. 
It  is  the  speech  of  deep  feeling,  that  must  be 
articulate  or  choke,  and  it  falls  naturally  and 
inevitably  into  some  form  which  accumulated 
passionate  moments  have  created  and  fixed. 
The  course  of  emotional  experiences  differs  very 
little  from  age  to  age,  and  from  individual  to 
individual,  and  so  the  same  phrases  may  be 
used  quite  sincerely  and  naturally  as  the  direct 
expression  of  feeling  at  its  highest  point  by  men 
apart  in  country,  circumstances,  or  time.  This 
is  not  to  say  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  origi- 
nality; a  poet  is  a  poet  first  and  most  of  all  because 
he  discovers  truths  that  have  been  known  for 
ages,  as  things  that  are  fresh  and  new  and  vital 
for  himself.  He  must  speak  of  them  in  language 
that  has  been  used  by  other  men  just  because 
they  are  known  truths,  but  he  will  use  that  lan- 
guage in  a  new  way,  and  with  a  new  significance, 
and  it  is  just  in  proportion  to  the  freshness,  and 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    39 

the  air  of  personal  conviction  and  sincerity  which 
he  imparts  to  it,  that  he  is  great. 

The  point  at  issue  bears  very  directly  on  the 
work  of  Sir  Philip  Sidney.  In  the  course  of  the 
history  of  English  letters  certain  authors  dis- 
engage themselves  who  have  more  than  a  merely 
literary  position:  they  are  symbolic  of  the  whole 
age  in  which  they  live,  its  life  and  action,  its 
thoughts  and  ideals,  as  well  as  its  mere  modes 
of  writing.  There  are  not  many  of  them  and 
they  could  be  easily  numbered;  Addison,  perhaps, 
certainly  Dr.  Johnson,  certainly  Byron,  and  in 
the  later  age  probably  Tennyson,  But  the 
greatest  of  them  all  is  Sir  Philip  Sidney:  his 
symboUcal  relation  to  the  time  in  which  he  lived 
was  realized  by  his  contemporaries,  and  it  has 
been  a  commonplace  of  history  and  criticism  ever 
since.  Elizabeth  called  him  one  of  the  jewels 
of  her  crown,  and  at  the  age  of  twenty-three, 
so  fast  did  genius  ripen  in  that  summer  time 
of  the  Renaissance,  William  the  Silent  could 
speak  of  him  as  "one  of  the  ripest  statesmen 
of  the  age."  He  travelled  widely  in  Europe, 
knew  many  languages,  and  dreamed  of  adven- 
ture in  America  and  on  the  high  seas.  In  a 
court  of  brilliant  figures,  his  was  the  most  daz- 
zling, and  his  death  at  Zutphen  only  served  to 
intensify  the  halo  of  romance  which  had  gath- 
ered round  his  name.  His  literary  exercises  were 
various:  in  prose  he  wrote  the  Arcadia  and  the 
Apology  for  Poetry,  the  one  the  beginning  of  a 
new  kind  of  imaginative  writing,  and  the  other 
the  first  of  the  series  of  those  rare  and  precious 
commentaries  of  their  own  art  which  some  of 


40    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

our  English  poets  have  left  us.  To  the  Arcadia 
we  shall  have  to  return  later  in  this  chapter.  It 
is  his  other  great  work,  the  sequence  of  sonnets 
entitled  Astrophel  and  Stella,  which  concerns  us 
here.  They  celebrate  the  history  of  his  love  for 
Penelope  Devereux,  sister  of  the  Earl  of  Essex, 
a  love  brought  to  disaster  by  the  intervention  of 
Queen  Elizabeth  with  whom  he  had  quarrelled. 
As  poetry  they  mark  an  epoch.  They  are  the 
first  direct  expression  of  an  intimate  and  per- 
sonal experience  in  English  literature,  struck  off 
in  the  white  heat  of  passion,  and  though  they 
are  coloured  at  times  with  that  over-fantastic 
imagery  which  is  at  once  a  characteristic  fault 
and  excellence  of  the  writing  of  the  time,  they 
never  lose  the  one  merit  above  all  others  of  lyric 
poetry,  the  merit  of  sincerity.  The  note  is  struck 
with  certainty  and  power  in  the  first  sonnet  of 
the  series: — 

"  Loving  in  truth,  and  fain  in  verse  my  love  to  show. 
That  she,  dear  she,  might  take  some  pleasure  of  my  pain, — ■ 
Pleasure  might  cause  her  read,  reading  might  make  hei 

know, — 
Knowledge  might  pity  win,  and  pity  grace  obtain, — 
I  sought  fit  words  to  paint  the  blackest  face  of  woe. 
Studying  inventions  fine  her  wits  to  entertain; 
Oft  turning  others'  leaves  to  see  if  thence  would  flow 
Some  fresh  and  fruitful  flower  upon  my  svmbumed  brain. 
But  words  came  halting  forth  .    .    . 
Biting  my  truant  pen,  beating  myself  for  spite. 
'Fool,'  said  my  muse  to  me,  'look  in  thy  heart  and  write.'" 

And  though  he  turned  others'  leaves  it  was 
quite  literally  looking  in  his  heart  that  he  wrote. 
He  analyses  the  sequence  of  his  feelings  with  a 
vividness   and   minuteness   which   assure   us   of 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    41 

their  truth.  All  that  he  tells  is  the  fruit  of  ex- 
perience, dearly  bought: 

"Desire!  desire!  I  have  too  dearly  bought 
With  price  of  mangled  mind  thy  worthless  ware. 
Too  long,  too  long!  asleep  thou  hast  me  brought. 
Who  shouldst  my  mind  to  higher  things  prepare." 

and  earlier  in  the  sequence — 

*'  I  now  have  learned  love  right  and  learned  even  so 
As  those  that  being  poisoned  poison  know." 

In  the  last  two  sonnets,  with  crowning  truth  and 
pathos  he  renounces  earthly  love  which  reaches 
but  to  dust,  and  which  because  it  fades  brings 
but  fading  pleasure: 

"Then  farewell,  world!    Thy  uttermost  I  see. 
Eternal  love,  maintain  thy  life  in  me." 

The  sonnets  were  published  after  Sidney's 
death,  and  it  is  certain  that  Uke  Shakespeare's 
they  were  never  intended  for  publication  at  all. 
The  point  is  important  because  it  helps  to  vindi- 
cate Sidney's  sincerity,  but  were  any  vindication 
needed  another  more  certain  might  be  found. 
The  Arcadia  is  strewn  with  love  songs  and  son- 
nets, the  exercises  solely  of  the  literary  imagin- 
ation. Let  any  one  who  wishes  to  gauge  the 
sincerity  of  the  impulse  of  the  Stella  sequence 
compare  any  of  the  poems  in  it  with  those  in  the 
romance. 

With  Sir  Philip  Sidney  literature  was  an  avo- 
cation, constantly  indulged  in,  but  outside  the 
main  business  of  his  life;  with  Edmund  Spenser 
public  life  and  affairs  were  subservient  to  an 
overmastering  poetic  impulse.  He  did  his  best 
to  carve  out  a  career  for  himself  like  other  young 


42    ENGLISH   LITERATURE— MODERN 

men  of  his  time,  followed  the  fortunes  of  the  Earl 
of  Leicester,  sought  desperately  and  unavailingly 
the  favour  of  the  Queen,  and  ultimately  accepted 
a  place  in  her  service  in  Ireland,  which  meant 
banishment  as  virtually  as  a  place  in  India  would 
to-day.  Henceforward  his  visits  to  London  and 
the  Court  were  few;  sometimes  a  lover  of  travel 
would  visit  him  in  his  house  in  Ireland  as  Raleigh 
did,  but  for  the  most  he  was  left  alone.  It  was 
in  this  atmosphere  of  loneliness  and  separation, 
hostile  tribes  pinning  him  in  on  every  side,  mur- 
der lurking  in  the  woods  and  marshes  round  him, 
that  he  composed  his  greatest  work.  In  it  at 
last  he  died,  on  the  heels  of  a  sudden  rising  in 
which  his  house  was  burnt  and  his  lands  over-run 
by  the  wild  Irish  whom  the  tyranny  of  the  Eng- 
lish planters  had  driven  to  vengeance.  Spenser 
was  not  without  interest  in  his  public  duties; 
his  View  of  the  State  of  Ireland  shows  that.  But 
it  shows,  too,  that  he  brought  to  them  singularly 
little  sympathy  or  imagination.  Throughout  his 
tone  is  that  of  the  worst  kind  of  English  offi- 
cialdom; rigid  subjection  and  in  the  last  re- 
sort massacre  are  the  remedies  he  would  apply 
to  Irish  discontent.  He  would  be  a  fine  text — 
which  might  be  enforced  by  modern  examples 
— for  a  discourse  on  the  evil  effects  of  immer- 
sion in  the  government  of  a  subject  race  upon 
men  of  letters.  No  man  of  action  can  be  so 
consistently  and  cynically  an  advocate  of  brutal- 
ism  as  your  man  of  letters.  Spenser,  of  course, 
had  his  excuses;  the  problem  of  Ireland  was  new 
and  it  was  something  remote  and  diflScult;  in 
all  but  the  mere  distance  for  travel,  Dublin  was 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    43 

as  far  from  London  as  Bombay  is  to-day.  But 
to  him  and  his  Hke  we  must  lay  down  partly  the 
fact  that  to-day  we  have  still  an  Irish  problem. 
But  though  fate  and  the  necessity  of  a  liveli- 
hood drove  him  to  Ireland  and  the  life  of  a  colon- 
ist, poetry  was  his  main  business.  He  had  been 
the  centre  of  a  brilliant  set  at  Cambridge,  one 
of  those  coteries  whose  fame,  if  they  are  brilliant 
and  vivacious  enough  and  have  enough  self- 
confidence,  penetrates  to  the  outer  world  before 
they  leave  the  University.  The  thing  happens 
in  our  own  day,  as  the  case  of  Oscar  Wilde  is 
witness;  it  happened  in  the  case  of  Spenser; 
and  when  he  and  his  friends  Gabriel  Harvey 
and  Edward  Kirke  came  "down"  it  was  to  im- 
mediate fame  amongst  amateurs  of  the  arts. 
They  corresponded  with  each  other  about  lit- 
erary matters,  and  Harvey  published  his  part  of 
the  correspondence;  they  played  like  Du  Bellay 
in  France,  with  the  idea  of  writing  English  verse 
in  the  quantitative  measures  of  classical  poetry; 
Spenser  had  a  love  affair  in  Yorkshire  and  wrote 
poetry  about  it,  letting  just  enough  be  known 
to  stimulate  the  imagination  of  the  public.  They 
tried  their  hands  at  everything,  imitated  every- 
thing, and  in  all  were  brilliant,  sparkling,  and 
decorative;  they  got  a  kind  of  entrance  to  the 
circle  of  the  Court.  Then  Spenser  published 
his  Shepherd's  Calendar,  a  series  of  pastoral 
eclogues  for  every  month  of  the  year,  after  a 
manner  taken  from  French  and  Italian  pastoral 
writers,  but  coming  ultimately  from  Vergil,  and 
Edward  Kirke  furnished  it  with  an  elaborate 
prose  commentary.     Spenser  took  the  same  lib- 


44    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

erties  with  the  pastoral  form  as  did  Vergil  himself; 
that  is  to  say  he  used  it  as  a  vehicle  for  satire 
and  allegory,  made  it  carry  political  and  social 
allusions,  and  planted  in  it  references  to  his 
friends.  By  its  publication  Spenser  became  the 
first  poet  of  the  day.  It  was  followed  by  some 
of  his  finest  and  most  beautiful  things — by  the 
Platonic  hymns,  by  the  Amoretti,  a  series  of  son- 
nets inspired  by  his  love  for  his  wife;  by  the 
Epithalamiurriy  on  the  occasion  of  his  marriage 
to  her;  by  Mother  Hubbard's  Tale,  a  satire  written 
when  despair  at  the  coldness  of  the  Queen  and 
the  enmity  of  Burleigh  was  beginning  to  take 
hold  on  the  poet  and  endowed  with  a  plainness 
and  vigour  foreign  to  most  of  his  other  work  — 
and  then  by  The  Fairy  Queen. 

The  poets  of  the  Renaissance  were  not  afraid 
of  big  things;  every  one  of  them  had  in  his  mind 
as  the  goal  of  poetic  endeavour  the  idea  of  the 
heroic  poem,  aimed  at  doing  for  his  own  country 
what  Vergil  had  intended  to  do  for  Rome  in  the 
Mneid,  to  celebrate  it — its  origin,  its  prowess, 
its  greatness,  and  the  causes  of  it,  in  epic  verse. 
Milton,  three-quarters  of  a  century  later,  turned 
over  in  his  mind  the  plan  of  an  English  epic  on 
the  wars  of  Arthur,  and  when  he  left  it  was  only 
to  forsake  the  singing  of  English  origins  for  the 
more  ultimate  theme  of  the  origins  of  mankind. 
Spenser  designed  to  celebrate  the  character, 
the  qualities  and  the  training  of  the  English 
gentleman.  And  because  poetry,  unlike  philos- 
ophy, cannot  deal  with  abstractions  but  must  be 
vivid  and  concrete,  he  was  forced  to  embody  his 
virtues  and  foes  to  virtue  and  to  use  the  way 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    45 

of  allegory.  His  outward  plan,  with  its  knights 
and  dragons  and  desperate  adventures,  he  pro- 
cured from  Ariosto.  As  for  the  use  of  allegory, 
it  was  one  of  the  discoveries  of  the  Middle  Ages 
which  the  Renaissance  condescended  to  retain. 
Spenser  elaborated  it  beyond  the  wildest  dreams 
of  those  students  of  Holy  Writ  who  had  first 
conceived  it.  His  stories  were  to  be  interesting 
in  themselves  as  tales  of  adventure,  but  within 
them  they  were  to  conceal  an  intricate  treatment 
of  the  conflict  of  truth  and  falsehood  in  morals 
and  religion.  A  character  might  typify  at  once 
Protestantism  and  England  and  Elizabeth  and 
chastity  and  half  the  cardinal  virtues,  and  it 
would  have  all  the  while  the  objective  interest 
attaching  to  it  as  part  of  a  story  of  adventure. 
All  this  must  have  made  the  poem  difficult 
enough.  Spenser's  manner  of  writing  it  made  it 
worse  still.  One  is  familiar  with  the  type  of  novel 
which  only  explains  itself  when  the  last  chapter 
is  reached — Stevenson's  Wrecker  is  an  example. 
The  Fairy  Queen  was  designed  on  somewhat  the 
same  plan.  The  last  section  was  to  relate  and 
explain  the  unrelated  and  unexplained  books 
which  made  up  the  poem,  and  at  the  court  to 
which  the  separate  knights  of  the  separate  books 
— the  Red  Cross  Knight  and  the  rest — were  to 
bring  the  fruit  of  their  adventures,  everything 
was  to  be  made  clear.  Spenser  did  not  live  to 
finish  his  work;  The  Fairy  Queen,  like  the  ^neidy 
is  an  uncompleted  poem,  and  it  is  only  from  a 
prefatory  letter  to  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  issued  with 
the  second  published  section  that  we  know  what 
the  poem  was  intended  to  be.    Had  Spenser  not 


46    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

published  this  explanation,  it  is  impossible  that 
anybody,  even  the  acutest  minded  German  pro- 
fessor, could  have  guessed. 

The  poem,  as  we  have  seen,  was  composed  in 
Ireland,  in  the  solitude  of  a  colonists'  plantation, 
and  the  author  was  shut  off  from  his  fellows  while 
he  wrote.  The  influence  of  his  surroundings  is 
visible  in  the  writing.  The  elaboration  of  the 
theme  would  have  been  impossible  or  at  least 
very  unlikely  if  its  author  had  not  been  thrown 
in  on  himself  during  its  composition.  Its  intri- 
cacy and  involution  is  the  product  of  an  over- 
concentration  born  of  empty  surroundings.  It 
lacks  vigour  and  rapidity;  it  winds  itself  into 
itself.  The  influence  of  Ireland,  too,  is  visible 
in  its  landscapes,  in  its  description  of  bogs  and 
desolation,  of  dark  forests  in  which  lurk  savages 
ready  to  spring  out  on  those  who  are  rash  enough 
to  wander  within  their  confines.  All  the  scenery 
in  it  which  is  not  imaginary  is  Irish  and  not 
English  scenery. 

Its  reception  in  England  and  at  the  Court  was 
enthusiastic.  Men  and  women  read  it  eagerly 
and  longed  for  the  next  section  as  our  grand- 
fathers longed  for  the  next  section  of  Pickwick. 
They  really  liked  it,  really  loved  the  intricacy 
and  luxuriousness  of  it,  the  heavy  exotic  language, 
the  thickly  painted  descriptions,  the  languorous 
melody  of  the  verse.  Mainly,  perhaps,  that  was 
so  because  they  were  all  either  in  wish  or  in  deed 
poets  themselves.  Spenser  has  always  been  "the 
poets'  poet."  Milton  loved  him;  so  did  Dry- 
den,  who  said  that  Milton  confessed  to  him  that 
Spenser  was  "his  original,"  a  statement  which 


ELIZABETHAN    POETRY    &    PROSE    47 

has  been  pronounced  incredible,  but  is,  in  truth, 
perfectly  comprehensible,  and  most  likely  true. 
Pope  admired  him;  Keats  learned  from  him  the 
best  part  of  his  music.  You  can  trace  echoes  of 
him  in  Mr,  Yeats.  What  is  it  that  gives  him  this 
hold  on  his  peers?  Well,  in  the  first  place  his 
defects  do  not  detract  from  his  purely  poetic 
qualities.  The  story  is  impossibly  told,  but  that 
will  only  worry  those  who  are  looking  for  a  story. 
The  allegory  is  hopelessly  difficult;  but  as  Haz- 
litt  said  "the  allegory  will  not  bite  you";  you 
can  let  it  alone.  The  crudeness  and  bigotry  of 
Spenser's  dealings  with  Catholicism,  which  are 
ridiculous  when  he  pictures  the  monster  Error 
vomiting  books  and  pamphlets,  and  disgusting 
when  he  draws  Mary  Queen  of  Scots,  do  not  hin- 
der the  pleasure  of  those  who  read  him  for  his 
language  and  his  art.  He  is  great  for  other  reasons 
than  these.  First  because  of  the  extraordinary 
smoothness  and  melody  of  his  verse  and  the 
richness  of  his  language — a  golden  diction  that 
he  drew  from  every  source — new  words,  old 
words,  obsolete  words — such  a  mixture  that  the 
purist  Ben  Jonson  remarked  acidly  that  he 
wrote  no  language  at  all.  Secondly  because  of 
the  profusion  of  his  imagery,  and  the  extraordi- 
narily keen  sense  for  beauty  and  sweetness  that 
went  to  its  making.  In  an  age  of  golden  language 
and  gallant  imagery  his  was  the  most  golden 
and  the  most  gallant.  And  the  language  of 
poetry  in  England  is  richer  and  more  varied 
than  that  in  any  other  coimtry  in  Europe  to-day, 
because  of  what  he  did. 


48    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

(3) 

Elizabethan  prose  brings  us  face  to  face  with 
a  difficulty  which  has  to  be  met  by  every  student 
of  literature.  Does  the  word  "literature"  cover 
every  kind  of  writing?  Ought  we  to  include  in 
it  writing  that  aims  merely  at  instruction  or  is 
merely  journey-work,  as  well  as  writing  that  has 
an  artistic  intention,  or  writing  that,  whether  its 
author  knew  it  or  no,  is  artistic  in  its  result?  Of 
course  such  a  question  causes  us  no  sort  of  diffi- 
culty when  it  concerns  itself  only  with  what  is 
being  published  to-day.  We  know  very  well 
that  some  things  are  literature  and  some  merely 
journalism;  that  of  novels,  for  instance,  some 
deliberately  intend  to  be  works  of  art  and  others 
only  to  meet  a  passing  desire  for  amusement  or 
mental  occupation.  We  know  that  most  books 
serve  or  attempt  to  serve  only  a  useful  and  not 
a  literary  purpose.  But  in  reading  the  books  of 
three  centuries  ago,  unconsciously  one's  point  of 
view  shifts.  Antiquity  gilds  journey-work;  re- 
moteness and  quaintness  of  phrasing  lend  a  kind 
of  distinction  to  what  are  simply  pamphlets  or 
text-books  that  have  been  preserved  by  accident 
from  the  ephemeral  ness  which  was  the  common 
lot  of  hundreds  of  their  fellows.  One  comes  to 
regard  as  literature  things  that  had  no  kind  of 
literary  value  for  their  first  audiences;  to  apply 
the  same  seriousness  of  judgment  and  the  same 
tests  to  the  pamphlets  of  Nash  and  Dekker  as 
to  the  prose  of  Sidney  and  Bacon.  One  loses,  in 
fact,  that  power  to  distinguish  the  important 
from  the  trivial  which  is  one  of  the  functions  of 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY     &  PROSE    49 

a  sound  literary  taste.  Now,  a  study  of  the  minor 
writing  of  the  past  is,  of  course,  well  worth  a 
reader's  pains.  Pamphlets,  chronicle  histories, 
text-books  and  the  like  have  an  historical  im- 
portance; they  give  us  glimpses  of  the  manners 
and  habits  and  modes  of  thought  of  the  day. 
They  tell  us  more  about  the  outward  show  of  life 
than  do  the  greater  books.  If  you  are  interested 
in  social  history,  they  are  the  very  thing.  But 
the  student  of  literature  ought  to  beware  of  them, 
nor  ought  he  to  touch  them  till  he  is  familiar 
with  the  big  and  lasting  things.  A  man  does 
not  possess  English  literature  if  he  knows  what 
Dekker  tells  of  the  seven  deadly  sins  of  London 
and  does  not  know  the  Fairy  Queen.  Though 
the  wide  and  curious  interest  of  the  Romantic 
critics  of  the  nineteenth  century  found  and  illu- 
mined the  byways  of  Elizabethan  writing,  the 
safest  method  of  approach  is  the  method  of  their 
predecessors — to  keep  hold  on  common  sense, 
to  look  at  literature,  not  historically  as  through 
the  wrong  end  of  a  telescope,  but  closely  and 
without  a  sense  of  intervening  time,  to  know  the 
best — the  "classic" — and  study  it  before  the 
minor  things. 

In  Elizabeth's  reign,  prose  became  for  the 
first  time,  with  cheapened  printing,  the  com- 
mon vehicle  of  amusement  and  information,  and 
the  books  that  remain  to  us  cover  many  depart- 
ments of  writing.  There  are  the  historians  who 
set  down  for  us  for  the  first  time  what  they 
knew  of  the  earlier  history  of  England.  There 
are  the  writers,  like  Harrison  and  Stubbs,  who 
described  the  England  of  their  own  day,  and 


50    ENGLISH    LITERATURE— MODERN 

there  are  many  authors,  mainly  anonymous,  who 
wrote  down  the  accounts  of  the  voyages  of  the 
discoverers  in  the  Western  Seas.  There  are  the 
novelists  who  translated  stories  mainly  from 
Italian  sources.  But  of  authors  as  conscious  of 
a  literary  intention  as  the  poets  were,  there  are 
only  two,  Sidney  and  Lyly,  and  of  authors  who, 
though  their  first  aim  was  hardly  an  artistic  one, 
achieved  an  artistic  result,  only  Hooker  and 
the  translators  of  the  Bible.  The  Authorized 
Version  of  the  Bible  belongs  strictly  not  to  the 
reign  of  Elizabeth  but  to  that  of  James,  and  we 
shall  have  to  look  at  it  when  we  come  to  discuss 
the  seventeenth  century.  Hooker,  in  his  book 
on  Ecclesiastical  Polity  (an  endeavour  to  set  forth 
the  grounds  of  orthodox  Anglicanism)  employed 
a  generous,  flowing,  melodious  style  which  has 
influenced  many  writers  since  and  is  familiar  to 
us  to-day  in  the  copy  of  it  used  by  Ruskin  in 
his  earlier  works.  Lyly  and  Sidney  are  worth 
looking  ^at  more  closely. 

The  age  was  intoxicated  with  language.  It 
went  mad  of  a  mere  delight  in  words.  Its  writers 
were  using  a  new  tongue,  for  English  was  en- 
riched beyond  all  recognition  with  borrowings 
from  the  ancient  authors;  and  like  all  artists 
who  became  possessed  of  a  new  medium,  they 
used  it  to  excess.  The  early  Elizabethans'  use 
of  the  new  prose  was  very  like  the  use  that 
educated  Indians  make  of  English  to-day.  It 
is  not  that  these  write  it  incorrectly,  but  only 
that  they  write  too  richly.  And  just  as  fuller 
use  and  knowledge  teaches  them  spareness  and 
economy  and  gives  their  writing  simplicity  and 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    51 

vigour,  so  seventeenth  century  practice  taught 
Englishmen  to  write  a  more  direct  and  undec- 
orated  style  and  gave  us  the  smooth,  simple, 
and  vigorous  writing  of  Dry  den — the  first  really 
modern  English  prose.  But  the  Elizabethans 
loved  gaudier  methods;  they  liked  highly  deco- 
rative modes  of  expression,  in  prose  no  less  than 
in  verse.  The  first  author  to  give  them  these 
things  was  John  Lyly,  whose  book  Euphues  was 
for  the  five  or  six  years  following  its  publication 
a  fashionable  craze  that  infected  all  society  and 
gave  its  name  to  a  pecuhar  and  highly  artificial 
style  of  writing  that  coloured  the  work  of  hosts 
of  obscure  and  forgotten  followers.  Lyly  wrote 
other  things;  his  comedies  may  have  taught 
Shakespeare  the  trick  of  Lovers  Labour  Lost;  he 
attempted  a  sequel  of  his  most  famous  work 
with  better  success  than  commonly  attends 
sequels,  but  for  us  and  for  his  own  generation 
he  is  the  author  of  one  book.  Everybody  read 
it,  everybody  copied  it.  The  maxims  and  sen- 
tences of  advice  for  gentlemen  which  it  contained 
were  quoted  and  admired  in  the  Court,  where 
the  author,  though  he  never  attained  the  lucra- 
tive position  he  hoped  for,  did  what  flattery 
could  do  to  make  a  name  for  himself.  The  name 
"Euphuism"  became  a  current  description  of  an 
artificial  way  of  using  words  that  overflowed  out 
of  writing  into  speech  and  was  in  the  mouths, 
while  the  vogue  lasted,  of  everybody  who  was 
anybody  in  the  circle  that  fluttered  round  the 
Queen. 

The  style  of  Euphues  was  parodied  by  Shake- 
speare and  many  attempts  have  been  made  to 


52    ENGLISH    LITERATURE— MODERN 

imitate  it  since.  Most  of  them  are  inaccurate 
— Sir  Walter  Scott's  wild  attempt  the  most  in- 
accurate of  all.  They  fail  because  their  authors 
have  imagined  that  "Euphuism"  is  simply  a 
highly  artificial  and  "flowery"  way  of  talking. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  it  is  made  up  of  a  very  exact 
and  very  definite  series  of  parts.  The  writing 
is  done  on  a  plan  which  has  three  main  charac- 
teristics as  follows.  First,  the  structure  of  the 
sentence  is  based  on  antithesis  and  alliteration; 
that  is  to  say,  it  falls  into  equal  parts  similar  in 
sound  but  with  a  different  sense;  for  example, 
Euphues  is  described  as  a  yoimg  gallant  "of 
more  wit  than  wealth,  yet  of  more  wealth  than 
wisdom."  All  the  characters  in  the  book,  which 
is  roughly  in  the  form  of  a  novel,  speak  in  this 
way,  sometimes  in  sentences  long  drawn  out 
which  are  oppressively  monotonous  and  tedious, 
and  sometimes  shortly  with  a  certain  approach 
to  epigram.  The  second  characteristic  of  the 
style  is  the  reference  of  every  stated  fact  to 
some  classical  authority,  that  is  to  say,  the 
author  cannot  mention  friendship  without  quot- 
ing David  and  Jonathan,  nor  can  lovers  in  his 
book  accuse  each  other  of  faithlessness  without 
quoting  the  instance  of  Cressida  or  -^neas. 
This  appeal  to  classical  authority  and  wealth 
of  classical  allusion  is  used  to  decorate  pages 
which  deal  with  matters  of  every-day  experi- 
ence. Seneca,  for  instance,  is  quoted  as  report- 
ing "that  too  much  bending  breaketh  the  bow," 
a  fact  which  might  reasonably  have  been  sup- 
posed to  be  known  to  the  author  himself.  This 
particular  form  of  writing    perhaps    influenced 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    53 

those  who  copied  Lyly  more  than  anything 
else  in  his  book.  It  is  a  fashion  of  the  more 
artificial  kind  of  Elizabethan  writing  in  all  schools 
to  employ  a  wealth  of  classical  allusion.  Even 
the  simple  narratives  in  HakluyVs  Voyages  are 
not  free  from  it,  and  one  may  hardly  hope  to 
read  an  account  of  a  voyage  to  the  Indies  with- 
out stumbling  on  a  preliminary  reference  to 
the  opinions  of  Aristotle  and  Plato,  Lastly, 
Euphues  is  characterised  by  an  extraordinary 
wealth  of  allusion  to  natural  history,  mostly 
of  a  fabulous  kind.  "I  have  read  that  the  bull 
being  tied  to  the  fig  tree  loseth  his  tail;  that 
the  whole  herd  of  deer  stand  at  gaze  if  they 
smell  a  sweet  apple;  that  the  dolphin  after 
the  sound  of  music  is  brought  to  the  shore," 
and  so  on.  His  book  is  full  of  these  things,  and 
the  style  weakens  and  loses  its  force  because 
of  them. 

Of  course  there  is  much  more  in  his  book 
than  this  outward  decoration.  He  wrote  with 
the  avowed  purpose  of  instructing  courtiers 
and  gentlemen  how  to  live.  Euphues  is  full  of 
grave  reflections  and  weighty  morals,  and  is 
indeed  a  collection  of  essays  on  education,  on 
friendship,  on  religion  and  philosophy,  and 
on  the  favourite  occupation  and  curriculum  of 
Elizabethan  youth — foreign  travel.  The  fash- 
ions and  customs  of  his  countrymen  which  he 
condemns  in  the  course  of  his  teaching  are  the 
same  as  those  inveighed  against  by  Stubbs 
and  other  contemporaries.  He  disliked  manners 
and  fashions  copied  from  Italy;  particularly  he 
disliked    the   extravagant    fashions    of    women. 


54    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

One  woman  only  escapes  his  censure,  and  slie, 
of  course,  is  the  Queen,  whom  Euphues  and  his 
companion  in  the  book  come  to  England  to  see. 
In  the  main  the  teaching  of  Euphues  inculcates 
a  humane  and  liberal,  if  not  very  profound  creed, 
and  the  book  shares  with  The  Fairy  Queen  the 
honour  of  the  earlier  Puritanism — the  Puritan- 
ism that  besides  the  New  Testament  had  the 
Republic. 

But  Euphues,  though  he  was  in  his  time  the 
popular  idol,  was  not  long  in  finding  a  successful 
rival.  Seven  years  before  his  death  Sir  Philip 
Sidney,  in  a  period  of  retirement  from  the  Court, 
wrote  "The  Countess  of  Pembroke's  Arcadia"; 
it  was  published  ten  years  after  it  had  been 
composed.  The  Arcadia  is  the  first  English 
example  of  the  prose  pastoral  romance,  as  the 
Shepherd's  Calendar  is  of  our  pastoral  verse. 
Imitative  essays  in  its  style  kept  appearing  for 
two  hundred  years  after  it,  till  Wordsworth  and 
other  poets  who  knew  the  country  drove  its 
unrealities  out  of  literature.  The  aim  of  it  and 
of  the  school  to  which  it  belonged  abroad  was 
to  find  a  setting  for  a  story  which  should  leave 
the  author  perfectly  free  to  plant  in  it  any  im- 
probability he  liked,  and  to  do  what  he  liked 
with  the  relations  of  his  characters.  In  the  shade 
of  beech  trees,  the  coils  of  elaborated  and  in- 
tricate love-making  wind  and  unravel  them- 
selves through  an  endless  afternoon.  In  that 
art  nothing  is  too  far-fetched,  nothing  too  senti- 
mental, no  sorrow  too  unreal.  The  pastoral 
romance  was  used,  too,  to  cover  other  things 
besides  a  sentimental  and  decorative  treatment 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  &  PROSE    55 

of  love.  Authors  wrapped  up  as  shepherds 
their  political  friends  and  enemies,  and  the  pas- 
toral eclogues  in  verse  which  Spenser  and  others 
composed  are  full  of  personal  and  political  allu- 
sion. Sidney's  story  carries  no  politics  and  he 
depends  for  its  interest  solely  on  the  wealth  of 
differing  episodes  and  the  stories  and  arguments 
of  love  which  it  contains.  The  story  would  fur- 
nish plot  enough  for  twenty  ordinary  novels,  but 
probably  those  who  read  it  when  it  was  pub- 
lished were  attracted  by  other  things  than  the 
march  of  its  incidents.  Certainly  no  one  could 
read  it  for  the  plot  now.  Its  attraction  is  mainly 
one  of  style.  It  goes,  you  feel,  one  degree  beyond 
Euphues  in  the  direction  of  freedom  and  poetry. 
And  just  because  of  this  greater  freedom,  its 
characteristics  are  much  less  easy  to  fix  than 
those  of  Euphues.  Perhaps  its  chief  quality  is 
best  described  as  that  of  exhaustiveness.  Sidney 
will  take  a  word  and  toss  it  to  and  fro  in  a  page 
till  its  meaning  is  sucked  dry  and  more  than 
sucked  dry.  On  page  after  page  the  same  trick 
is  employed,  often  in  some  new  and  charming 
way,  but  with  the  inevitable  effect  of  wearying 
the  reader,  who  tries  to  do  the  unwisest  of  all 
things  with  a  book  of  this  kind — to  read  on. 
This  trick  of  bandying  words  is,  of  course,  com- 
mon in  Shakespeare.  Other  marks  of  Sidney's 
style  belong  similarly  to  poetry  rather  than 
to  prose.  Chief  of  them  is  what  Ruskin  chris- 
tened the  "pathetic  fallacy" — the  assumption 
(not  common  in  his  day)  which  connects  the 
appearance  of  nature  with  the  moods  of  the 
artist  who  looks  at  it,  or  demands  such  a  con- 


56    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

nection.  In  its  day  the  Arcadia  was  hailed  as 
a  reformation  by  men  nauseated  by  the  rhyth- 
mical pattens  for  Lyly.  A  modern  reader  finds 
himself  confronting  it  in  something  of  the  spirit 
that  he  would  confront  the  prose  romances,  say, 
of  William  Morris,  finding  it  charming  as  a  poet's 
essay  in  prose,  but  no  more;  not  to  be  ranked 
with  the  highest. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  DRAMA 
(1) 

Biologists  tell  us  that  the  hybrid — the  product 
of  a  variety  of  ancestral  stocks — is  more  fertile 
than  an  organism  with  a  direct  and  unmixed 
ancestry;  perhaps  the  analogy  is  not  too  fanci- 
ful as  the  starting-point  of  a  study  of  Elizabethan 
drama,  which  owed  its  strength  and  vitality, 
more  than  to  anything  else,  to  the  variety  of  the 
discordant  and  contradictory  elements  of  which 
it  was  made  up.  The  drama  was  the  form  into 
which  were  moulded  the  thoughts  and  desires  of 
the  best  spirits  of  the  time.  It  was  the  flower 
of  the  age.  To  appreciate  its  many-sided  sig- 
nificances and  achievements  it  is  necessary  to 
disentangle  carefully  its  roots,  in  religion,  in 
the  revival  of  the  classics,  in  popular  enter- 
tainments, in  imports  from  abroad,  in  the  air 
of  enterprise  and  adventure  which  belonged  to 
the  time. 


THE  DRAMA  57 

As  in  Greece,  drama  in  England  was  in  its 
beginning  a  religious  thing.  Its  oldest  continu- 
ous tradition  was  from  the  mediaeval  Church. 
Early  in  the  Middle  Ages  the  clergy  and  their 
parishioners  began  the  habit,  at  Christmas, 
Easter  and  other  holy  days,  of  playing  some  part 
of  the  story  of  Christ's  life  suitable  to  the  festival 
of  the  day.  These  plays  were  liturgical,  and 
originally,  no  doubt,  overshadowed  by  a  choral 
element.  But  gradually  the  inherent  human 
capacity  for  mimicry  and  drama  took  the  upper 
hand;  from  ceremonies  they  developed  into  per- 
formances; they  passed  from  the  stage  in  the 
church  porch  to  the  stage  in  the  street.  A  wag- 
gon, the  natural  human  platform  for  mimicry 
or  oratory,  became  in  England  as  it  was  in  Greece, 
the  cradle  of  the  drama.  This  momentous  change 
in  the  history  of  the  miracle  play,  which  made 
it  in  all  but  its  occasion  and  its  subject  a  secular 
thing,  took  place  about  the  end  of  the  twelfth 
century.  The  rise  of  the  town  guilds  gave  the 
plays  a  new  character;  the  friendly  rivalry  of 
leagued  craftsmen  elaborated  their  production; 
and  at  length  elaborate  cycles  were  founded  which 
were  performed  at  Whitsuntide,  beginning  at 
sunrise  and  lasting  all  through  the  day  right  on 
to  dusk.  Each  town  had  its  own  cycle,  and  of 
these  the  cycles  of  York,  Wakefield,  Chester, 
and  Coventry  still  remain.  So  too,  does  an 
eye-witness's  account  of  a  Chester  performance, 
where  the  plays  took  place  yearly  on  three  days, 
beginning  with  Whit  Monday.  "The  manner 
of  these  plays  were,  every  company  had  his 
pageant  or  part,  a  high  scaffold  with  two  rooms. 


58    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

a  higher  and  a  lower,  upon  four  wheels.  In  the 
lower  they  apparelled  themselves  and  in  the  higher 
room  they  played,  being  all  open  on  the  top  that 
all  beholders  might  hear  and  see  them.  They 
began  first  at  the  abbey  gates,  and  when  the  first 
pageant  was  played,  it  was  wheeled  to  the  high 
cross  before  the  mayor  and  so  to  every  street. 
So  every  street  had  a  pageant  playing  upon  it 
at  one  time,  till  all  the  pageants  for  the  day  ap- 
pointed were  played."  The  "companies"  were 
the  town  guilds  and  the  several  "pageants"  dif- 
ferent scenes  in  Old  or  New  Testament  story. 
As  far  as  was  possible  each  company  took  for 
its  pageant  some  Bible  story  fitting  to  its  trade; 
in  York  the  goldsmiths  played  the  three  Kings 
of  the  East  bringing  precious  gifts,  the  fish- 
mongers the  flood,  and  the  shipwrights  the 
building  of  Noah's  ark.  The  tone  of  these  plays 
was  not  reverent;  reverence  after  all  implies 
near  at  hand  its  opposite  in  unbelief.  But  they 
were  realistic  and  they  contained  within  them 
the  seeds  of  later  drama  in  the  aptitude  with 
which  they  grafted  into  the  sacred  story  pas- 
toral and  city  manners  taken  straight  from 
life.  The  shepherds  who  watched  by  night  at 
Bethlehem  were  real  English  shepherds  furnished 
with  boisterous  and  realistic  comic  relief.  Noah 
was  a  real  shipwright. 

"It  shall  be  clinched  each  ilk  and  deal. 
With  nails  that  are  both  noble  and  new 
Thus  shall  I  fix  it  to  the  keel. 
Take  here  a  rivet  and  there  a  screw. 
With  there  bow  there  now,  work  I  well. 
This  work,  I  warrant,  both  good  and  true." 


THE  DRAMA  59 

Cain  and  Abel  were  English  farmers  just  as 
truly  as  Bottom  and  his  fellows  were  English 
craftsmen.  But  then  Julius  Caesar  has  a  doublet 
and  in  Dutch  pictures  the  apostles  wear  broad- 
brimmed  hats.  Squeamishness  about  historical 
accuracy  is  of  a  later  date,  and  when  it  came  we 
gained  in  correctness  less  than  we  lost  in  art. 

The  miracle  plays,  then,  are  the  oldest  ante- 
cedent of  Ehzabethan  drama,  but  it  must  not  be 
supposed  they  were  over  and  done  with  before 
the  great  age  began.  The  description  of  the 
Chester  performances,  part  of  which  has  been 
quoted,  was  written  in  1594.  Shakespeare  must, 
one  would  think,  have  seen  the  Coventry  cycle; 
at  any  rate  he  was  familiar,  as  every  one  of  the 
time  must  have  been,  with  the  performances; 
" Out-heroding  Herod"  bears  witness  to  that. 
One  must  conceive  the  development  of  the 
Elizabethan  age  as  something  so  rapid  in  its 
accessibility  to  new  impressions  and  new  man- 
ners and  learning  and  modes  of  thought  that 
for  years  the  old  and  new  subsisted  side  by 
side.  Think  of  modern  Japan,  a  welter  of  old 
faiths  and  crafts  and  ideals  and  inrushing  West- 
ern civihzation  all  mixed  up  and  side  by  side  in 
the  strangest  contrasts  and  you  will  understand 
what  it  was.  The  miracle  plays  stayed  on  beside 
Marlowe  and  Shakespeare  till  Puritanism  frowned 
upon  them.  But  when  the  end  came  it  came 
quickly.  The  last  recorded  performance  took 
place  in  London  when  King  James  entertained 
Gondomar,  the  Spanish  ambassador.  And  per- 
haps we  should  regard  that  as  a  "command"  per- 
formance,   reviving    as   command    performances 


60    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

commonly  do,  something  dead  for  a  generation 
— in  this  case,  purely  out  of  compliment  to  the 
faith  and  inclination  of  a  distinguished  guest. 

Next  in  order  of  development  after  the  mira- 
cle or  mystery  plays,  though  contemporary  in 
their  popularity,  came  what  we  called  "moral- 
ities" or  "moral  interludes" — pieces  designed  to 
enforce  a  religious  or  ethical  lesson  and  per- 
haps to  get  back  into  drama  something  of  the 
edification  which  reaUsm  had  ousted  from  the 
miracles.    They  dealt  in  allegorical  and  figurative 

f)ersonages,  expounded  wise  saws  and  moral 
essons,  and  squared  rather  with  the  careful 
self-concern  of  the  newly  established  Protes- 
tantism than  with  the  frank  and  joyous  jest 
in  life  which  was  more  characteristic  of  the 
time.  Everyman,  the  oftenest  revived  and  best 
known  of  them,  if  not  the  best,  is  very  typical 
of  the  class.  They  had  their  influences,  less 
profound  than  that  of  the  miracles,  on  the  full 
drama.  It  is  said  the  "Vice" — unregeneracy 
commonly  degenerated  into  comic  relief — is  the 
ancestor  of  the  fool  in  Shakespeare,  but  more 
likely  both  are  successive  creations  of  a  dynasty 
of  actors  who  practised  the  unchanging  and 
immemorial  art  of  the  clown.  The  general 
structure  of  Everyman  and  some  of  its  fellows, 
heightened  and  made  more  dramatic,  gave  us 
Marlowe's  Faustus.  There  perhaps  the  influence 
ends. 

The  rise  of  a  professional  class  of  actors  brought 
one  step  nearer  the  full  growth  of  drama.  Com- 
panies of  strolling  players  formed  themselves 
and  passed  from  town  to  town,  seeking  like  the 


THE  DRAMA  61 

industrious  amateurs  of  the  guilds,  civic  pat- 
ronage, and  performing  in  town-halls,  market- 
place booths,  or  inn  yards,  whichever  served 
them  best.  The  structure  of  the  Elizabethan 
inn  yard  (you  may  see  some  survavals  still,  and 
there  are  the  pictures  in  Pickwick)  was  very 
favourable  for  their  purpose.  The  galleries  round 
it  made  seats  like  our  boxes  and  circle  for  the 
more  pri\'ileged  spectators;  in  the  centre  on  the 
floor  of  the  yard  stood  the  crowd  or  sat,  if  they 
had  stools  with  them.  The  stage  was  a  plat- 
form set  on  this  floor  space  with  its  back  against 
one  side  of  the  yard,  where  perhaps  one  of  the 
inn-rooms  served  as  a  dressing  room.  So  suit- 
able was  this  "fit-up"  as  actors  call  it,  that 
when  theatres  came  to  be  built  in  London  they 
were  built  on  the  inn-yard  pattern.  All  the 
playhouses  of  the  Bankside  from  the  "Curtain" 
to  the  "Globe"  were  square  or  circular  places 
with  galleries  rising  above  one  another  three 
parts  round,  a  floor  space  of  beaten  earth  open 
to  the  sky  in  the  middle,  and  jutting  out  on  to 
it  a  platform  stage  with  a  tiring  room  capped  by 
a  gallery  behind  it. 

The  entertainment  given  by  these  companies 
of  players  (who  usually  got  the  patronage  and 
took  the  title  of  some  lord)  was  various.  They 
played  moralities  and  interludes,  they  played 
formless  chronicle  history  plays  like  the  Trouble- 
some Reign  of  King  John,  on  which  Shakespeare 
worked  for  his  King  John;  but  above  and  be- 
fore all  they  were  each  a  company  of  specialists, 
every  one  of  whom  had  his  own  talent  and  per- 
formance for  which  he  was  admired.    The  Eliza- 


62     ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

bethan  stage  was  the  ancestor  of  our  music-hall, 
and  to  the  modern  music-hall  rather  than  to  the 
theatre  it  bears  its  affinity.  If  you  wish  to  realize 
the  aspect  of  the  Globe  or  the  Blackfriars  it  is 
to  a  lower  class  music-hall  you  must  go.  The 
quality  of  the  audience  is  a  point  of  agreement. 
The  Globe  was  frequented  by  young  "bloods'* 
and  by  the  more  disreputable  portions  of  the 
community,  racing  men  (or  their  equivalents 
of  that  day)  "coney  catchers"  and  the  like; 
commonly  the  only  women  present  were  women 
of  the  town.  The  similarity  extends  from  the 
auditorium  to  the  stage.  The  Elizabethan  play- 
goer delighted  in  virtuosity;  in  exhibitions  of 
strength  or  skill  from  his  actors;  the  broad- 
sword combat  in  Macbeth,  and  the  wrestling  in 
As  You  Like  It,  were  real  trials  of  skill.  The  bear 
in  the  Winter's  Tale  was  no  doubt  a  real  bear  got 
from  a  bear  pit,  near  by  in  the  Bankside.  The 
comic  actors  especially  were  the  very  grandfathers 
of  our  music-hall  stars;  Tarleton  and  Kemp  and 
Cowley,  the  chief  of  them,  were  as  much  popular 
favourites  and  esteemed  as  separate  from  the 
plays  they  played  in  as  is  Harry  Lauder.  Their 
songs  and  tunes  were  printed  and  sold  in  hun- 
dreds as  broadsheets,  just  as  pirated  music-hall 
songs  are  sold  to-day.  This  is  to  be  noted  because 
it  explains  a  great  deal  in  the  subsequent  evo- 
lution of  the  drama.  It  explains  the  delight  in 
having  everything  represented  actually  on  the 
stage,  all  murders,  battles,  duels.  It  explains 
the  magnificent  largesse  given  by  Shakespeare 
to  the  professional  fool.  Work  had  to  be  found 
for  him,  and  Shakespeare,  whose  difficulties  were 


THE  DRAMA  63 

stepping-stones  to  his  triumphs,  gave  him  Touch- 
stone and  Feste,  the  Porter  in  Macbeth  and  the 
Fool  in  Lear.  Others  met  the  problem  in  an 
attitude  of  frank  despair.  Not  all  great  tragic 
writers  can  easily  or  gracefully  wield  the  pen  of 
comedy,  and  Marlowe  in  Dr.  Faustus  took  the 
course  of  leaving  the  low  comedy  which  the 
audience  loved  and  a  high  salaried  actor  de- 
manded, to  an  inferior  collaborator. 

Alongside  this  drama  of  street  platforms  and 
inn-yards  and  public  theatres,  there  grew  another 
which,  blending  with  it,  produced  the  Elizabethan 
drama  which  we  know.  The  public  theatres 
were  not  the  only  places  at  which  plays  were 
produced.  At  the  University,  at  the  Inns  of 
Court  (which  then  more  than  now,  were  besides 
centres  of  study  rather  exclusive  and  expensive 
clubs),  and  at  the  Court  they  were  an  important 
part  of  almost  every  festival.  At  these  places 
were  produced  academic  compositions,  either 
allegorical  like  the  masques,  copies  of  which  we 
find  in  Shakespeare  and  by  Ben  Jonson,  or  com- 
edies modelled  on  Plautus  or  Terence,  or  tragedies 
modelled  on  Seneca.  The  last  were  incompara- 
bly the  most  important.  The  Elizabethan  age, 
which  always  thought  of  literature  as  a  guide 
or  handmaid  to  life,  was  naturally  attracted  to 
a  poet  who  dealt  in  maxims  and  "sentences"; 
his  rhetoric  appealed  to  men  for  whom  words 
and  great  passages  of  verse  were  an  intoxication 
that  only  a  few  to-day  can  understand  or  sympa- 
thize with;  his  bloodthirstiness  and  gloom  to  an 
age  so  full-blooded  as  not  to  shrink  from  horrors. 
Tragedies  early  began  to  be  written  on  the  strictly 


64     ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

Senecan  model,  and  generally,  like  Seneca's, 
with  some  ulterior  intention.  Sackville's  Gor- 
boduc,  the  first  tragedy  in  English,  produced  at 
a  great  festival  at  the  Inner  Temple,  aimed  at 
inducing  Elizabeth  to  marry  and  save  the  miseries 
of  a  disputed  succession.  To  be  put  to  such  a 
use  argues  the  importance  and  dignity  of  this 
classical  tragedy  of  the  learned  societies  and  the 
court.  None  of  the  pieces  composed  in  this 
style  were  written  for  the  popular  theatre,  and 
indeed  they  could  not  have  been  a  success  on 
it.  The  Elizabethan  audience,  as  we  have  seen, 
loved  action,  and  in  these  Senecan  tragedies  the 
action  took  place  "oflf."  But  they  had  a  strong 
and  abiding  influence  on  the  popular  stage;  they 
gave  it  its  ghosts,  its  supernatural  warnings,  its 
conception  of  nemesis  and  revenge,  they  gave  it 
its  love  of  introspection  and  the  long  passages 
in  which  introspection,  description  or  reflection, 
either  in  soliloquy  or  dialogue,  holds  up  the  action; 
contradictorily  enough  they  gave  it  something 
at  least  of  its  melodrama.  Perhaps  they  helped 
to  enforce  the  lesson  of  the  miracle  plays  that 
a  dramatist's  proper  business  was  elaboration 
rather  than  invention.  None  of  the  Elizabethan 
dramatists  except  Ben  Jonson  habitually  con- 
structed their  own  plots.  Their  method  was  to 
take  something  ready  at  their  hands  and  overlay 
it  with  realism  or  poetry  or  romance.  The  stories 
of  their  plays,  like  that  of  Hamlet's  Mousetrap, 
were  "extant  and  writ  in  choice  Italian,"  and 
very  often  their  methods  of  preparation  were  very 
like  his. 
Something  of  the  way  in  which  the  spirit  of 


THE  DRAMA  65 

adventure  of  the  time  affected  and  finished  the 
drama  we  have  already  seen.  It  is  time  now  to 
turn  to  the  dramatists  themselves. 


(2) 

Of  Marlowe,  Kyd,  Greene,  and  Peele,  the 
"University  Wits"  who  fused  the  academic  and 
the  popular  drama,  and  by  giving  the  latter  a 
sense  of  literature  and  learning  to  mould  it  to 
finer  issues,  gave  us  Shakespeare,  only  Marlowe 
can  be  treated  here.  Greene  and  Peele,  the  former 
by  his  comedies,  the  latter  by  his  historical  plays, 
and  Kyd  by  his  tragedies,  have  their  places  in  the 
text-books,  but  they  belong  to  a  secondary  order 
of  dramatic  talent.  Marlowe  ranks  amongst  the 
greatest.  It  is  not  merely  that  historically  he 
is  the  head  and  fount  of  the  whole  movement, 
that  he  changed  blank  verse,  which  had  been  a 
lumbering  instrument  before  him,  into  some- 
thing rich  and  ringing  and  rapid  and  made  it  the 
vehicle  for  the  greatest  English  poetry  after  him. 
Historical  relations  apart,  he  is  great  in  himself 
More  than  any  other  English  writer  of  any  age, 
except  Byron,  he  symbolizes  the  youth  of  his 
time;  its  hot-bloodedness,  its  lust  after  knowl- 
edge and  power  and  life  inspires  all  his  pages. 
The  teaching  of  Machiavelli,  misunderstood  for 
their  ovm.  purposes  by  would-be  imitators,  fur- 
nished the  reign  of  Elizabeth  with  the  only  po- 
litical ideals  it  possessed.  The  simple  brutalism 
of  the  creed,  with  means  justified  by  ends  and 
the  imbridled  self-regarding  pursuit  of  power,  at- 


66    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

traded  men  for  whom  the  Spanish  monarchy  and 
the  struggle  to  overthrow  it  were  the  main  factors 
and  politics.  Marlowe  took  it  and  turned  it  to  his 
own  uses.  There  is  in  his  writings  a  lust  of  power, 
"a  hunger  and  thirst  after  unrighteousness," 
a  glow  of  the  imagination  unhallowed  by  any- 
thing but  its  own  energy  which  is  in  the  spirit 
of  the  time.  In  Tamburlaine  it  is  the  power  of 
conquest,  stirred  by  and  reflecting,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  great  deeds  of  his  day.  In  Dr.  Faustus 
it  is  the  pride  of  will  and  eagerness  of  curiosity. 
Faustus  is  devoured  by  a  tormenting  desire  to 
enlarge  his  knowledge  to  the  utmost  bounds  of 
nature  and  art  and  to  extend  his  power  with  his 
knowledge.  His  is  the  spirit  of  Renaissance 
scholarship  heightened  to  a  passionate  excess. 
The  play  gleams  with  the  pride  of  learning  and 
a  knowledge  which  learning  brings,  and  with  the 
nemesis  that  comes  after  it.  "Oh!  gentlemen! 
hear  me  with  patience  and  tremble  not  at  my 
speeches.  Though  my  heart  pant  and  quiver  to 
remember  that  I  have  been  a  student  here  these 
thirty  years;  oh!  I  would  I  had  never  seen 
Wittemburg,  never  read  book!"  And  after  the 
agonizing  struggle  in  which  Faustus's  soul  is 
torn  from  him  to  hell,  learning  comes  in  at  the 
quiet  close. 

"  Yet,  for  he  was  a  scholar  once  admired. 
For  wondrous  knowledge  in  our  German  Schoob; 

We  '11  give  his  mangled  limbs  due  burial; 
And  all  the  students,  clothed  in  mourning  black 

Shall  wait  upon  his  heavy  funeral." 

Some  one  character  is   a  centre  of  overmas- 
tering pride  and   ambition  in  every  play.     In 


THE  DRAMA  67 

the  Jew  of  Malta  it  is  the  hero  Barabbas.  In 
Edward  II.  it  is  Piers  Gaveston.  In  Edward  II. 
indeed,  two  elements  are  mixed — the  element 
of  Machiavelli  and  Tamburlaine  in  Gaveston, 
and  the  purely  tragic  element  which  evolves 
from  within  itself  the  style  in  which  it  shall 
be  treated,  in  the  King.  "The  reluctant  pangs 
of  abdicating  Royalty,"  wrote  Charles  Lamb  in 
a  famous  passage,  "furnished  hints  which  Shake- 
speare scarcely  improved  in  his  Richard  II.; 
and  the  death  scene  of  Marlowe's  King  moves 
pity  and  terror  beyond  any  scene,  ancient  or 
modern,  with  which  I  am  acquainted."  Per- 
haps the  play  gives  the  hint  of  what  Marlowe 
might  have  become  had  not  the  dagger  of  a 
groom  in  a  tavern  cut  short  at  thirty  his  burn- 
ing career. 

Even  in  that  time  of  romance  and  daring 
speculation  he  went  further  than  his  fellows. 
He  was  said  to  have  been  tainted  with  atheism, 
to  have  denied  God  and  the  Trinity;  had  he 
lived  he  might  have  had  trouble  with  the  Star 
Chamber.  The  free-voyaging  intellect  of  the 
age  found  this  one  way  of  outlet,  but  if  liter- 
ary evidences  are  to  be  trusted  sixteenth  and 
seventeenth  century  atheism  was  a  very  crude 
business.  The  Atheist's  Tragedy  of  Tourneur 
(a  dramatist  who  need  not  otherwise  detain 
us)  gives  some  measure  of  its  intelligence  and 
depth.    Says  the  villain  to  the  heroine, 

"No?    Then  invoke 
Your  great  supposed  Protector.    I  will  do't." 

to  which  she: 


68    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

"Supposed  Protector!    Are  you  an  atheist,  then 
I  know  my  fears  and  prayers  are  spent  in  vain." 

Marlowe's  very  faults  and  extravagances,  and 
they  are  many,  are  only  the  obverse  of  his  great- 
ness. Magnitude  and  splendour  of  language 
when  the  thought  is  too  shrunken  to  fill  it  out, 
becomes  mere  inflation.  He  was  a  butt  of  the 
parodists  of  the  day.  And  Shakespeare,  though 
he  honoured  him  "on  this  side  idolatry,"  did  his 
share  of  ridicule.  Ancient  Pistol  is  fed  and  stuffed 
with  relics  and  rags  of  Marlowesque  affectation — 

"Holla!  ye  pampered  jades  of  Asia, 
Can  ye  not  draw  but  twenty  miles  a  day." 

is  a  quotation  taken  straight  from  Tamburlaine. 


(3) 

A  study  of  Shakespeare,  who  refuses  to  be 
crushed  within  the  limits  of  a  general  essay, 
is  no  part  of  the  plan  of  this  book.  We  must 
take  up  the  story  of  the  drama  with  the  reign 
of  James  and  with  the  contemporaries  of  his 
later  period,  though  of  course,  a  treatment 
which  is  conditioned  by  the  order  of  develop- 
ment is  not  strictly  chronological,  and  some  of 
the  plays  we  shall  have  to  refer  to  belong  to 
the  close  of  the  sixteenth  century.  We  are 
apt  to  forget  that  alongside  Shakespeare  and 
at  his  heels  other  dramatists  were  supplying 
material  for  the  theatre.  The  influence  of  Mar- 
lowe and  particularly  of  Kyd,  whose  Spanish 
Tragedy  with  its  crude  mechanism  of  ghosts  and 


THE  DRAMA  69 

madness  and  revenge  caught  the  popular  taste, 
worked  itself  out  in  a  score  of  journeymen  dram- 
atists, mere  hack  writers,  who  turned  their 
hand  to  plays  as  the  hacks  of  to-day  turn  their 
hand  to  novels,  and  with  no  more  literary  merit 
than  that  caught  as  an  echo  from  better  men  than 
themselves.  One  of  the  worst  of  these — he  is 
also  one  of  the  most  typical — was  John  Marston, 
a  purveyor  of  tragic  gloom  and  sardonic  satire, 
and  an  impostor  in  both,  whose  tragedy  Antonia 
and  Mellida  was  published  in  the  same  year 
as  Shakespeare's  Hamlet.  Both  plays  owed  their 
style  and  plot  to  the  same  tradition — the  tra- 
dition created  by  Kyd's  Spanish  Tragedy — in 
which  ghostly  promptings  to  revenge,  terrible 
crime,  and  a  feigned  madman  waiting  his  oppor- 
tunity are  the  elements  of  tragedy.  Nothing 
could  be  more  fruitful  in  an  understanding  of 
the  relations  of  Shakespeare  to  his  age  than  a 
comparison  of  the  two.  The  style  of  Antonio  and 
Mellida  is  the  style  of  The  Murder  of  Gonzago. 
There  is  no  subtlety  nor  introspection,  the  pale 
cast  of  thought  falls  with  no  shadow  over  its 
scenes.  And  it  is  typical  of  a  score  of  plays  of 
the  kind  we  have  and  beyond  doubt  of  hundreds 
that  have  perished.    Shakespeare  stands  alone. 

Beside  this  journey-work  tragedy  of  revenge 
and  murder  which  had  its  root  through  Kyd 
and  Marlowe  in  Seneca  and  in  Italian  romance, 
there  was  a  joumey-work  comedy  of  low  life 
made  up  of  loosely  constructed  strings  of  incidents, 
buffoonery  and  romance,  that  had  its  roots  in  a 
joyous  and  fantastic  study  of  the  common  people. 
These  plays  are  happy  and  high-spirited  and, 


70    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

compared  with  the  ordinary  run  of  the  tragedies, 
of  better  workmanship.  They  deal  in  the  familiar 
situations  of  low  comedy — the  clown,  the  thrifty 
citizen  and  his  frivolous  wife,  the  gallant,  the 
bawd,  the  good  apprentice  and  the  bad  portrayed 
vigorously  and  tersely  and  with  a  careless  kindly 
gaiety  that  still  charms  in  the  reading.  The 
best  writers  in  this  kind  were  Middleton  and 
Dekker — and  the  best  play  to  read  as  a  sample 
of  it  Eastward  Ho!  in  which  Marston  put  off  his 
affectation  of  sardonical  melancholy  and  joined 
with  Jonson  and  Dekker  to  produce  what  is  the 
masterpiece  of  the  non-Shakespearean  comedy 
of  the  time. 

For  all  our  habit  of  grouping  their  works  to- 
gether it  is  a  far  cry  in  spirit  and  temperament 
from  the  dramatists  whose  heyday  was  under 
Elizabeth  and  those  who  reached  their  prime 
under  her  successor.  Quickly  though  insensibly 
the  temper  of  the  nation  suffered  eclipse.  The 
high  hopes  and  the  ardency  of  the  reign  of  Eliza- 
beth saddened  into  a  profound  pessimism  and 
gloom  in  that  of  James.  This  apparition  of  un- 
sought melancholy  has  been  widely  noted  and 
generally  assumed  to  be  inexplicable.  In  broad 
outline  its  causes  are  clear  enough.  "To  travel 
hopefully  is  a  better  thing  than  to  arrive."  The 
Elizabethans  were,  if  ever  any  were,  hopeful 
travellers.  The  winds  blew  them  to  the  four 
quarters  of  the  world;  they  navigated  all  seas; 
they  sacked  rich  cities.  They  beat  off  the  great 
Armada,  and  harried  the  very  coasts  of  Spain. 
They  pushed  discovery  to  the  ends  of  the  world 
and  amassed  great   wealth.     Under  James  all 


THE  DRAMA  71 

these  things  were  over.  Peace  was  made  with 
Spain:  national  pride  was  wounded  by  the  solici- 
tous anxiety  of  the  King  for  a  Spanish  marriage 
for  the  heir  to  the  throne.  Sir  Walter  Raleigh, 
a  romantic  adventurer  lingering  beyond  his  time, 
was  beheaded  out  of  hand  by  the  ungenerous 
timidity  of  the  monarch  to  whom  had  been  trans- 
ferred devotion  and  loyalty  he  was  unfitted  to 
receive.  The  Court  which  had  been  a  centre  of 
flashing  and  gleaming  brilliance  degenerated  into 
a  knot  of  sycophants  humouring  the  pragmatic 
and  self-important  folly  of  a  king  in  whom  had 
implanted  themselves  all  the  vices  of  the  Scots 
and  none  of  their  virtues.  Nothing  seemed  left 
remarkable  beneath  the  visiting  moon.  The  bright 
day  was  done  and  they  were  for  the  dark.  The 
uprising  of  Puritanism  and  the  shadow  of  impend- 
ing religious  strife  darkened  the  temper  of  the  time. 
The  change  affected  all  hterature  and  par- 
ticularly the  drama,  which  because  it  appeals  to 
what  all  men  have  in  common,  commonly  reflects 
soonest  a  change  in  the  outlook  or  spirits  of  a 
people.  The  onslaughts  of  the  dramatists  on 
the  Puritans,  always  implacable  enemies  of  the 
theatre,  became  more  virulent  and  envenomed. 
What  a  difference  between  the  sunny  satire  of 
Sir  Andrew  Aguecheek  and  the  dark  animosity 
of  The  Atheists'  Tragedy  with  its  Languebeau 
Snuffe  ready  to  carry  out  any  villainy  proposed 
to  him!  "I  speak  sir,"  says  a  lady  in  the  same 
play  to  a  courtier  who  played  with  her  in  an 
attempt  to  carry  on  a  quick  wit  ted,  "conceited" 
love  passage  in  the  vein  of  Much  Ado,  "I  speak, 
sir,   as  the  fashion  now  is,   in  earnest."     The 


72    ENGLISH    LITERATURE— MODERN 

quick-witted,  light-hearted  age  was  gone.  It  is 
natural  that  tragedy  reflected  this  melancholy  in 
its  deepest  form.  Gloom  deepened  and  had  no 
light  to  relieve  it,  men  supped  full  of  horrors 
— there  was  no  slackening  of  the  tension,  no  con- 
cession to  overwrought  nerves,  no  resting-place 
for  the  overwrought  soul.  It  is  in  the  dramatist 
John  Webster  that  this  new  spirit  has  its  most 
powerful  exponent. 

The  influence  of  Machiavelli,  which  had  given 
Marlowe  tragic  figures  that  were  bright  and  splen- 
did and  burning,  smouldered  in  Webster  into  a 
duskier  and  intenser  heat.  His  fame  rests  on 
two  tragedies.  The  White  Devil  and  The  Duchess 
of  Malfi.  Both  are  stories  of  lust  and  crime,  full 
of  hate  and  hideous  vengeances,  and  through 
each  runs  a  vein  of  bitter  and  ironical  comment 
on  men  and  women.  In  them  chance  plays  the 
part  of  fate.  "Blind  accident  and  blundering 
mishap — 'such  a  mistake,'  says  one  of  the  crim- 
inals, *as  I  have  often  seen  in  a  play'  are  the 
steersmen  of  their  fortunes  and  the  doomsmen 
of  their  deeds."  His  characters  are  gloomy; 
meditative  and  philosophic  murderers,  cynical 
informers,  sad  and  loving  women,  and  they 
are  all  themselves  in  every  phrase  that  they 
utter.  But  they  are  studied  in  earnestness  and 
sincerity.  Unquestionably  he  is  the  greatest  of 
Shakespeare's  successors  in  the  romantic  drama, 
perhaps  his  only  direct  imitator.  He  has  single 
lines  worthy  to  set  beside  those  in  Othello  or 
King  Lear.  His  dirge  in  the  Duchess  of  Malfi, 
Charles  Lamb  thought  worthy  to  be  set  beside 
the  ditty  in  The  Tempest,  which  reminds  Ferdi- 


THE  DRAMA  73 

nand  of  his  drowned  father.  "As  that  is  of  the 
water,  watery,  so  this  is  of  the  earth,  earthy." 
He  has  earned  his  place  among  the  greatest  of 
our  dramatists  by  his  two  plays,  the  theme  of 
which  matched  his  sombre  genius  and  the  sombre- 
ness  of  the  season  in  which  it  flowered. 

But  the  drama  could  not  survive  long  the 
altered  times,  and  the  voluminous  plays  of  Beau- 
mont and  Fletcher  mark  the  beginning  of  the 
end.  They  are  the  decadence  of  Elizabethan 
drama.  Decadence  is  a  term  often  used  loosely 
and  therefore  hard  to  define,  but  we  may  say 
broadly  that  an  art  is  decadent  when  any  par- 
ticular one  of  the  elements  which  go  to  its  making 
occurs  in  excess  and  disturbs  the  balance  of 
forces  which  keeps  the  work  a  coherent  and  intact 
whole.  Poetry  is  decadent  when  the  sound  is 
allowed  to  outrun  the  sense  or  when  the  sug- 
gestions, say,  of  colour,  which  it  contains  are 
allowed  to  crowd  out  its  deeper  implications. 
Thus  we  can  call  such  a  poem  as  this  one  well- 
known  of  O'Shaughnessy's 

"We  are  the  music-makers. 
We  are  the  dreamers  of  dreams." 

decadent  because  it  conveys  nothing  but  the 
mere  delight  in  an  obvious  rhythm  of  words,  or 
such  a  poem  as  Morris's  "Two  red  roses  across 
the  moon,"  because  a  meaningless  refrain,  merely 
pleasing  in  its  word  texture,  breaks  in  at  inter- 
vals on  the  reader.  The  drama  of  Beaumont 
and  Fletcher  is  decadent  in  two  ways.-  In  the 
first  place  those  variations  and  licences  with 
which  Shakespeare  in  his  later  plays  diversified 


74    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

the  blank  verse  handed  on  to  him  by  Marlowe, 
they  use  without  any  restraint  or  measure. 
"Weak"  endings  and  "double"  endings,  t.e.  lines 
which  end  either  on  a  conjunction  or  preposition 
or  some  other  unstressed  word,  or  lines  in  which 
there  is  a  syllable  too  many — abound  in  their 
plays.  They  destroyed  blank  verse  as  a  musical 
and  resonant  poetic  instrument  by  letting  this 
element  of  variety  outrun  the  sparing  and  skilful 
use  which  alone  could  justify  it.  But  they  were 
decadent  in  other  and  deeper  ways  than  that. 
Sentiment  in  their  plays  usurps  the  place  of 
character.  Eloquent  and  moving  speeches  and 
fine  figures  are  no  longer  subservient  to  the  pres- 
entation of  character  in  action,  but  are  set  down 
for  their  own  sake,  "What  strange  self -trumpet- 
ers and  tongue-bullies  all  the  brave  soldiers  of 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher  are,"  said  Coleridge. 
When  they  die  they  die  to  the  music  of  their 
own  virtue.  When  dreadful  deeds  are  done  they 
are  described  not  with  that  authentic  and  lurid 
vividness  which  throws  light  on  the  working 
of  the  human  heart  in  Shakespeare  or  Webster 
but  in  tedious  rhetoric.  Resignation,  not  for- 
titude, is  the  authors'  forte  and  they  play  upon 
it  amazingly.  The  sterner  tones  of  their  prede- 
cessors melt  into  the  long  drawn  broken  accent 
of  pathos  and  woe.  This  delight  not  in  action 
or  in  emotion  arising  from  action  but  in  pas- 
sivity of  suffering  is  only  one  aspect  of  a  certain 
mental  flaccidity  in  grain.  Shakespeare  may  be 
free  and  even  coarse.  Beaumont  and  Fletcher 
cultivate  indecency.  They  made  their  subject 
not  their  master  but  their  plaything,  or  an  occa- 


THE  DRAMA  75 

sion  for  the  convenient  exercise  of  their  own 
powers  of  figure  and  rhetoric. 

Of  their  followers,  Massinger,  Ford  and  Shirley, 
no  more  need  be  said  than  they  carried  one  step 
further  the  faults  of  their  masters.  Emotion  and 
tragic  passion  give  way  to  wire-drawn  sentiment. 
Tragedy  takes  on  the  air  of  a  masquerade. 
With  them  romantic  drama  died  a  natural  death 
and  the  Puritans'  closing  of  the  theatre  only  gave 
it  a  coup  de  grace.  In  England  it  has  had  no 
second  birth. 

(4) 

Outside  the  direct  romantic  succession  there 
worked  another  author  whose  lack  of  sym- 
pathy with  it,  as  well  as  his  close  connection 
with  the  age  which  followed,  justifies  his  sepa- 
rate treatment.  Ben  Jonson  shows  a  marked 
contrast  to  Shakespeare  in  his  character,  his  ac- 
complishments, and  his  attitude  to  letters,  while 
his  career  was  more  varied  than  Shakespeare's 
own.  The  first  "classic"  in  English  writing,  he 
was  a  "romantic"  in  action.  In  his  adventur- 
ous youth  he  was  by  turns  scholar,  soldier,  brick- 
layer, actor.  He  trailed  a  pike  with  Leicester  in 
the  Low  Countries;  on  his  return  to  England 
fought  a  duel  and  killed  his  man,  only  escaping 
hanging  by  benefit  of  clergy;  at  the  end  of  his 
life  he  was  Poet  Laureate.  Such  a  career  is 
sufficiently  diversified,  and  it  forms  a  striking 
contrast  to  the  plainness  and  severity  of  his 
work.  But  it  must  not  lead  us  to  forget  or 
under-estimate  his  learning  and  knowledge.    Not 


76    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

Gray  nor  Tennyson,  nor  Swinburne — ^perhaps 
not  even  Milton — was  a  better  scholar.  He  is 
one  of  the  earliest  of  English  writers  to  hold  and 
express  different  theories  about  literature.  He 
consciously  appointed  himself  a  teacher;  was  a 
missionary  of  literature  with  a  definite  creed. 

But  though  in  a  general  way  his  dramatic 
principles  are  opposed  to  the  romantic  tenden- 
cies of  his  age,  he  is  by  no  means  blindly  clas- 
sical. He  never  consented  to  be  bound  by  the 
"Unities" — that  conception  of  dramatic  con- 
struction evolved  out  of  Aristotle  and  Horace 
and  elaborated  in  the  Renaissance  till,  in  its 
strictest  form,  it  laid  down  that  the  whole  scene 
of  a  play  should  be  in  one  place,  its  whole  action 
deal  with  one  single  series  of  events,  and  the 
time  it  represented  as  elapsing  be  no  greater 
than  the  time  it  took  in  playing.  He  was  always 
pre-eminently  an  Englishman  of  his  own  day 
with  a  scholar's  rather  than  a  poet's  temper, 
hating  extravagance,  hating  bombast  and  cant, 
and  only  limited  because  in  ruling  out  these  things 
he  ruled  out  much  else  that  was  essential  to  the 
spirit  of  the  time.  As  a  craftsman  he  was  un- 
compromising; he  never  bowed  to  the  tastes  of 
the  public  and  never  veiled  his  scorn  of  those — 
Shakespeare  among  them — whom  he  conceived  to 
do  so;  but  he  knew  and  valued  his  own  work,  as 
his  famous  last  word  to  an  audience  who  might 
be  unsympathetic  stands  to  witness, 

"By  God  'tis  good,  and  if  you  like  it  you  may." 

Compare  the  temper  it  reveals  with  the  titles 
of  the  two  contemporary  comedies  of  his  gentler 


THE  DRAMA  77 

and  greater  brother,  the  one  As  You  Like  It, 
the  other  What  You  Will.  Of  the  two  attitudes 
towards  the  public,  and  they  might  stand  as 
typical  of  two  kinds  of  artists,  neither  perhaps 
can  claim  complete  sincerity.  A  truculent  and 
noisy  disclaimer  of  their  favours  is  not  a  bad 
tone  to  assume  towards  an  audience;  in  the  end 
it  is  apt  to  succeed  as  well  as  the  sub-ironical 
compliance  which  is  its  opposite. 

Jonson's  theory  of  comedy  and  the  conscious- 
ness with  which  he  set  it  against  the  practice 
of  his  contemporaries  and  particularly  of  Shake- 
speare receive  explicit  statement  in  the  prologue 
to  Every  Man  Out  of  His  Humour — one  of  his 
earlier  plays.  "I  travail  with  another  objec- 
tion, Signer,  which  I  fear  will  be  enforced  against 
the  author  ere  I  can  be  delivered  of  it,"  says 
Mitis.  "What's  that,  sir?"  replies  Cordatus. 
Mitis: — "That  the  argument  of  his  comedy 
might  have  been  of  some  other  nature,  as  of  a 
duke  to  be  in  love  with  a  countess,  and  that 
countess  to  be  in  love  with  the  duke's  son,  and 
the  son  to  love  the  lady's  waiting  maid;  some 
such  cross-wooing,  better  than  to  be  thus  near 
and  familiarly  allied  to  the  times."  Cordatus: 
"You  say  well,  but  I  would  fain  hear  one  of  these 
autumn- judgments  define  Quin  sit  comoedia?  If 
he  cannot,  let  him  concern  himself  with  Cicero's 
definition,  till  he  have  strength  to  propose  to 
himself  a  better,  who  would  have  a  comedy  to 
be  invitatio  vitcB,  speculum  consuetudinis,  imago 
veritatis;  a  thing  throughout  pleasant  and  ridicu- 
lous and  accommodated  to  the  correction  of 
manners,"    That  was  what  he  meant  his  comedy 


78    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

to  be,  and  so  he  conceived  the  popular  comedy 
of  the  day,  Twelfth  Night  and  Much  Ado.  Shake- 
speare might  play  with  dukes  and  countesses, 
serving- women  and  pages,  clowns  and  disguises; 
he  would  come  down  more  near  and  ally  himself 
familiarly  with  the  times.  So  comedy  was  to 
be  medicinal,  to  purge  contemporary  London 
of  its  follies  and  its  sins;  and  it  was  to  be  con- 
structed with  regularity  and  elaboration,  respect- 
ful to  the  Unities  if  not  ruled  by  them,  and  built 
up  of  characters  each  the  embodiment  of  some 
"humour"  or  eccentricity,  and  each  when  his 
eccentricity  is  displaying  itself  at  its  fullest, 
outwitted  and  exposed.  This  conception  of 
"humours,"  based  on  a  physiology  which  was 
already  obsolescent,  takes  heavily  from  the 
realism  of  Jonson's  methods,  nor  does  his  use 
of  a  careful  vocabulary  of  contemporary  collo- 
quialism and  slang  save  him  from  a  certain 
dryness  and  tediousness  to  modern  readers. 
The  truth  is  he  was  less  a  satirist  of  contem- 
porary manners  than  a  satirist  in  the  abstract 
who  followed  the  models  of  classical  writers 
in  this  style,  and  he  found  the  vices  and  follies 
of  his  own  day  hardly  adequate  to  the  intricacy 
and  elaborateness  of  the  plots  which  he  con- 
structed for  their  exposure.  At  the  first  glance 
his  people  are  contemporary  types,  at  the  sec- 
ond they  betray  themselves  for  what  they  are 
really — cock-shies  set  up  by  the  new  comedy 
of  Greece  that  every  "classical"  satirist  in  Rome 
or  France  or  England  has  had  his  shot  at  since. 
One  wonders  whether  Ben  Jonson,  for  all  his 
satirical  intention,  had  as  much  observation — 


THE  DRAMA  79 

as  much  of  an  eye  for  contemporary  tyjjes — as 
Shakespeare's  rustics  and  roysterers  prove  him 
to  have  had.  It  follows  that  all  but  one  or  two 
of  his  plays,  when  they  are  put  on  the  stage 
to-day,  are  apt  to  come  to  one  with  a  sense  of 
remoteness  and  other-worldliness  which  we  hardly 
feel  with  Shakespeare  or  Moliere.  His  muse 
moves  along  the  high-road  of  comedy  which  is 
the  Roman  road,  and  she  carries  in  her  train 
types  that  have  done  service  to  many  since  the 
ancients  fashioned  them  years  ago.  Jealous 
husbands,  foolish  pragmatic  fathers,  a  dissolute 
son,  a  boastful  soldier,  a  cunning  slave — they 
all  are  merely  counters  by  which  the  game  of 
comedy  used  to  be  played.  In  England,  since 
Shakespeare  took  his  hold  on  the  stage,  that 
road  has  been  stopped  for  us,  that  game  has 
ceased  to  amuse. 

Ben  Jonson,  then,  in  a  certain  degree  failed 
in  his  intention.  Had  he  kept  closer  to  con- 
temporary life,  instead  of  merely  grafting  on  to 
it  types  he  had  learned  from  books,  he  might 
have  made  himself  an  English  Moliere — without 
Moliere's  breadth  and  clarity — but  with  a  cor- 
responding vigour  and  strength  which  would 
have  kept  his  work  sweet.  And  he  might  have 
founded  a  school  of  comedy  that  would  have  got 
its  roots  deeper  into  our  national  life  than  the 
trivial  and  licentious  Restoration  comedy  ever 
succeeded  in  doing.  As  it  is,  his  importance  is 
mostly  historical.  One  must  credit  him  with 
being  the  first  of  the  English  classics — of  the 
age  which  gave  us  Dryden  and  Swift  and  Pope. 
Perhaps  that  is  enough  in  his  praise. 


80    ENGLISH    LITERATURE— MODERN 
CHAPTER  IV 

THE  SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY 
(1) 

With  the  seventeenth  century  the  great  school 
of  imaginative  writers  that  made  glorious  the 
last  years  of  Elizabeth's  reign,  had  passed  away. 
Spenser  was  dead  before  1600,  Sir  Philip  Sidney 
a  dozen  years  earlier,  and  though  Shakespeare 
and  Drayton  and  many  other  men  whom  we 
class  roughly  as  Elizabethan  lived  on  to  work 
under  James,  their  temper  and  their  ideals  be- 
long to  the  earlier  day.  The  seventeenth  century, 
not  in  England  only  but  in  Europe,  brought  a 
new  way  of  thinking  with  it,  and  gave  a  new 
direction  to  human  interest  and  to  human  affairs. 
It  is  not  perhaps  easy  to  define  nor  is  it  visible 
in  the  greater  writers  of  the  time.  Milton,  for 
instance,  and  Sir  Thomas  Browne  are  both  of 
them  too  big,  and  in  their  genius  too  far  separated 
from  their  fellows  to  give  us  much  clue  to  altered 
conditions.  It  is  commonly  in  the  work  of  lesser 
and  forgotten  writers  that  the  spirit  of  an  age 
has  its  fullest  expression.  Genius  is  a  law  to 
itself;  it  moves  in  another  dimension;  it  is  out  of 
time.  To  define  this  seventeenth  century  spirit, 
then,  one  must  look  at  the  literature  of  the  age 
as  a  whole.  What  is  there  that  one  finds  in  it 
which  marks  a  change  in  temperament  and  outlook 
from  the  Renaissance,  and  the  time  which  imme- 
diately followed  it? 

Putting  it  very  broadly  one  may  say  that 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     81 

literature  in  the  seventeenth  century  becomes 
for  the  first  time  essentially  modern  in  spirit. 
We  began  our  survey  of  modern  English  litera- 
ture at  the  Renaissance  because  the  discovery  of 
the  New  World,  and  the  widening  of  human 
experience  and  knowledge,  which  that  and  the 
revival  of  classical  learning  implied,  mark  a 
definite  break  from  a  way  of  thought  which  had 
been  continuous  since  the  break  up  of  the  Roman 
Empire.  The  men  of  the  Renaissance  felt  them- 
selves to  be  modern.  They  started  afresh,  owing 
nothing  to  their  immediate  forbears,  and  when 
they  talked,  say,  of  Chaucer,  they  did  so  in  very 
much  the  same  accent  as  we  do  to-day.  He 
was  mediaeval  and  obsolete;  the  interest  which 
he  possessed  was  a  purely  literary  interest;  his 
readers  did  not  meet  him  easily  on  the  same 
plane  of  thought,  or  forget  the  lapse  of  time  which 
separated  him  from  them.  And  in  another  way 
too,  the  Renaissance  began  modern  writing.  In- 
flections had  been  dropped.  The  revival  of  the 
classics  had  enriched  our  vocabulary,  and  the 
English  language,  after  a  gradual  impoverish- 
ment which  followed  the  obsolescence  one  after 
another  of  the  local  dialects,  attained  a  fairly 
fixed  form.  There  is  more  difference  between 
the  language  of  the  English  writings  of  Sir 
Thomas  More  and  that  of  the  prose  of  Chaucer 
than  there  is  between  that  of  More  and  of  Ruskin. 
But  it  is  not  till  the  seventeenth  century  that  the 
modern  spirit,  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the  word, 
comes  into  being.  Defined  it  means  a  spirit 
of  observation,  of  preoccupation  with  detail, 
of  stress  laid  on  matter  of  fact,  of  analysis  of 


82    ENGLISH    LITERATURE— MODERN 

feelings  and  mental  processes,  of  free  argument 
upon  institutions  and  government.  In  relation 
to  knowledge,  it  is  the  spirit  of  science,  and  the 
study  of  science,  which  is  the  essential  intellec- 
tual fact  in  modern  history,  dates  from  just  this 
time,  from  Bacon  and  Newton  and  Descartes. 
In  relation  to  literature,  it  is  the  spirit  of  criti- 
cism, and  criticism  in  England  is  the  creation  of 
the  seventeenth  century.  The  positive  temper, 
the  attitude  of  realism,  is  everywhere  in  the 
ascendant.  The  sixteenth  century  made  voyages 
of  discovery;  the  seventeenth  sat  down  to  take 
stock  of  the  riches  it  had  gathered.  For  the 
first  time  in  English  literature  writing  becomes  a 
vehicle  for  storing  and  conveying  facts. 

It  would  be  easy  to  give  instances:  one  must 
suffice  here.  Biography,  which  is  one  of  the 
most  characteristic  kinds  of  English  writing,  was 
unknown  to  the  moderns  as  late  as  the  sixteenth 
century.  Partly  the  awakened  interest  in  the 
careers  of  the  ancient  statesmen  and  soldiers 
which  the  study  of  Plutarch  had  excited,  and 
partly  the  general  interest  in,  and  craving  for, 
facts  set  men  writing  down  the  lives  of  their 
fellows.  The  earliest  English  biographies  date 
from  this  time.  In  the  beginning  they  were 
concerned,  like  Plutarch,  with  men  of  action, 
and  when  Sir  Fulke  Greville  wrote  a  brief  ac- 
count of  his  friend  Sir  Philip  Sidney  it  was 
the  courtier  and  the  soldier,  and  not  the  author, 
that  he  designed  to  celebrate.  But  soon  men 
of  letters  came  within  their  scope,  and  though 
the  interest  in  the  lives  of  authors  came  too 
late  to  give  us  the  contemporary  life  of  Shake- 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     83 

speare  we  so  much  long  for,  it  was  early  enough 
to  make  possible  those  masterpieces  of  con- 
densed biography  in  which  Isaak  Walton  cele- 
brates Herbert  and  Donne.  Fuller  and  Aubrey, 
to  name  only  two  authors,  spent  lives  of  labori- 
ous industry  in  hunting  down  and  chronicling 
the  smallest  facts  about  the  worthies  of  their 
day  and  the  time  immediately  before  them. 
Autobiography  followed  where  biography  led. 
Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury  and  Margaret  Duchess 
of  Newcastle,  as  well  as  less  reputable  persons, 
followed  the  new  mode.  By  the  time  of  the  Res- 
toration Pepys  and  Evelyn  were  keeping  their 
diaries,  and  Fox  his  journal.  Just  as  in  poetry 
the  lyric,  that  is  the  expression  of  personal 
feeling,  became  more  widely  practised,  more 
subtle  and  more  sincere,  in  prose  the  letter, 
the  journal,  and  the  autobiography  formed  them- 
selves to  meet  the  new  and  growing  demand  for 
analysis  of  the  feelings  and  the  intimate  thoughts 
and  sensations  of  real  men  and  women.  A  minor 
form  of  literature  which  had  a  brief  but  popular 
vogue  ministered  less  directly  to  the  same  need. 
The  "Character,"  a  brief  descriptive  essay  on 
a  contemporary  type — a  tobacco  seller,  an  old 
college  butler  or  the  like — was  popular  because 
in  its  own  way  it  matched  the  newly  awakened 
taste  for  realism  and  fact.  The  drama  which 
in  the  hands  of  Ben  Jonson  had  attacked  folly 
and  wickedness  proper  to  no  place  or  time, 
descended  to  the  drawing-rooms  of  the  day, 
and  Congreve  occupied  himself  with  the  por- 
trayal of  the  social  frauds  and  foolishnesses 
perpetrated  by  actual  living  men  and  women 


84    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

of  fashion  in  contemporary  London.  Satire  ceased 
to  be  a  mere  expression  of  a  vague  discontent, 
and  became  a  weapon  against  opposing  men 
and  policies.  The  new  generation  of  readers 
were  nothing  if  not  critical.  They  were  for  test- 
ing directly  institutions  whether  they  were  liter- 
ary, social,  or  political.  They  wanted  facts,  and 
they  wanted  to  take  a  side. 

In  the  distinct  and  separate  realm  of  poetry 
a  revolution  no  less  remarkable  took  place. 
Spenser  had  been  both  a  poet  and  a  Puritan: 
he  had  designed  to  show  by  his  great  poem  the 
training  and  fashioning  of  a  Puritan  English 
gentleman.  But  the  alliance  between  poetry 
and  Puritanism  which  he  typified  failed  to  sur- 
vive his  death.  The  essentially  pagan  spirit  of 
the  Renaissance  which  caused  him  no  doubts  nor 
difficulties  proved  too  strong  for  his  readers  and 
his  followers,  and  the  emancipated  artistic  en- 
thusiasm in  which  it  worked  aUenated  from  secular 
poetry  men  with  deep  and  strong  religious  con- 
victions. Religion  and  moraUty  and  poetry, 
which  in  Sidney  and  Spenser  had  gone  hand  in 
hand,  separated  from  each  other.  Poems  like 
Venus  and  Adonis  or  like  Shakespeare's  sonnets 
could  hardly  be  squared  with  the  sterner  tem- 
per which  persecution  began  to  breed.  Even 
within  orthodox  Anglicanism  poetry  and  religion 
began  to  be  deemed  no  fit  company  for  each 
other.  When  George  Herbert  left  off  courtier 
and  took  orders  he  burnt  his  earlier  love  poetry, 
and  only  the  persuasion  of  his  friends  prevented 
Donne  from  following  the  same  course.  Pure 
poetry  became  more  and  more  an  exotic.     All 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     85 

Milton's  belongs  to  his  earlier  youth;  his  middle 
age  was  occupied  with  controversy  and  propa- 
ganda in  prose;  when  he  returned  to  poetry 
in  blindness  and  old  age  it  was  "to  justify  the 
ways  of  God  to  man" — to  use  poetry,  that  is, 
for  a  spiritual  and  moral  rather  than  an  artistic 

;Thougn  Tne  age/yas  curious  and  inquiring, 
hough  poetry  and  prose  tended  more  and  more 
to  be  enUsted  in  the  service  of  non-artistic  en- 
thusiasms and  to  be  made  the  vehicle  of  deeper 
emotions  and  interests  than  perhaps  a  northern 
people  could  ever  find  in  art,  pure  and  simple, 
it  was  not  like  the  time  that  followed  it,  a  "pro- 
saic" age.  Enthusiasm  burned  fierce  and  clear, 
displaying  itself  in  the  passionate  polemic  of 
Milton,  in  the  fanaticism  of  Bunyan  and  Fox, 
hardly  more  than  in  the  gentle,  steadfast  search 
for  knowledge  in  Burton  and  the  wide  and  vig- 
ilant curiousness  of  Bacon.  Its  eager  experi- 
mentalism  tried  the  impossible;  wrote  poems 
and  then  gave  them  a  weight  of  meaning  they 
could  not  carry,  as  when  Fletcher  in  The  Purple 
Island  designed  to  allegorize  all  that  the  physi- 
ology of  his  day  knew  of  the  human  body,  or 
Donne  sought  to  convey  abstruse  scientific 
fact  in  a  lyric.  It  gave  men  a  passion  for  pure 
learning,  set  Jonson  to  turn  himself  from  a  brick- 
layer into  the  best  equipped  scholar  of  his  day, 
and  Fuller  and  Camden  grubbing  among  Eng- 
lish records  and  gathering  for  the  first  time 
materials  of  scientific  value  for  EngUsh  history. 
Enthusiasm  gave  us  poetry  that  was  at  once 
full  of  learning  and  of  imagination,  poetry  that 


86    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

was  harsh  and  brutal  in  its  roughness  and  at 
the  same  time  impassioned.  And  it  set  up  a 
school  of  prose  that  combined  colloquial  readi- 
ness and  fluency,  pregnancy  and  high  sentiment 
with  a  cumbrous  pedantry  of  learning  which  was 
the  fruit  of  its  own  excess. 

The  form  in  which  enthusiasm  manifested 
itself  most  fiercely  was  as  we  have  seen  not 
favourable  to  literature.  Puritanism  drove  it- 
self like  a  wedge  into  the  art  of  the  time,  broad- 
ening as  it  went.  Had  there  been  no  more  in 
it  than  the  moral  earnestness  and  religiousness 
of  Sidney  and  Spenser,  Cavalier  would  not  have 
differed  from  Roundhead,  and  there  might  have 
been  no  civil  war;  each  party  was  endowed 
deeply  with  the  religious  sense  and  Charles  I. 
was  a  sincerely  pious  man.  But  while  Spenser 
and  Sidney  held  that  life  as  a  preparation  for 
eternity  must  be  ordered  and  strenuous  and 
devout  but  that  care  for  the  hereafter  was  not 
incompatible  with  a  frank  and  full  enjoyment 
of  life  as  it  is  lived,  Puritanism  as  it  developed 
in  the  middle  classes  became  a  sterner  and 
darker  creed.  The  doctrine  of  original  sin, 
face  to  face  with  the  fact  that  art,  like  other 
pleasures,  was  naturally  and  readily  entered 
into  and  enjoyed,  forced  them  to  the  plain  con- 
clusion that  art  was  an  evil  thing.  As  early 
as  Shakespeare's  youth  they  had  been  strong 
enough  to  keep  the  theatres  outside  London 
walls;  at  the  time  of  the  Civil  War  they  closed 
them  altogether,  and  the  feud  which  had  lasted 
for  over  a  generation  between  them  and  the 
dramatists  ended  in  the  destruction  of  the  literary 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     87 

drama.  In  the  brief  years  of  their  ascendancy 
they  produced  no  Hterature,  for  Milton  is  much 
too  large  to  be  tied  down  to  their  negative  creed, 
and,  indeed,  in  many  of  his  qualities,  his  love 
of  music  and  his  sensuousness  for  instance,  he 
is  antagonistic  to  the  temper  of  his  day.  With 
the  Restoration  their  earnest  and  strenuous 
spirit  fled  to  America.  It  is  noteworthy  that  it 
had  no  literary  manifestation  there  till  two  centu- 
ries after  the  time  of  its  passage.  Hawthorne's 
novels  are  the  fruit — the  one  ripe  fruit  in  art — of 
the  Puritan  imagination. 


(2) 

If  the  reader  adopts  the  seventeenth  century 
habit  himself  and  takes  stock  of  what  the  Eliza- 
bethans accomphshed  in  poetry,  he  will  recognize 
speedily  that  their  work  reached  various  stages 
of  completeness.  They  perfected  the  poetic 
drama  and  its  instrument,  blank  verse;  they 
perfected,  though  not  in  the  severer  Italian 
form,  the  sonnet;  they  wrote  with  extraordinary 
delicacy  and  finish  short  lyrics  in  which  a  simple 
and  freer  manner  drawn  from  the  classics  took 
the  place  of  the  mediaeval  intricacies  of  the  bal- 
lad and  the  rondeau.  And  in  the  forms  which 
they  failed  to  bring  to  perfection  they  did  beauti- 
ful and  noble  work.  The  splendour  of  The  Fairy 
Queen  is  in  separate  passages;  as  a  whole  it 
is  over  tortuous  and  slow;  its  affectations,  its 
sensuousness,  the  mere  difficulty  of  reading  it, 
make  us  feel  it  a  collection  of  great  passages. 


88    ENGLISH   LITERATURE— MODERN 

strung  it  is  true  on  a  large  conception,  rather 
than  a  great  work.  The  EUzabethans,  that  is, 
had  not  discovered  the  secret  of  the  long  poem; 
the  abstract  idea  of  the  "heroic"  epic  which  was 
in  all  their  minds  had  to  wait  for  embodiment 
till  Paradise  Lost.  In  a  way  their  treatment 
of  the  pastoral  or  eclogue  form  was  imperfect 
too.  They  used  it  well  but  not  so  well  as  their 
models,  Vergil  and  Theocritus;  they  had  not 
quite  mastered  the  convention  on  which  it  is 
built. 

The  seventeenth  century,  taking  stock  in  some 
such  fashion  of  its  arti;rtic  possessions,  found 
some  things  it  were  vain  to  try  to  do.  It  could 
add  nothing  to  the  accomplishment  of  the  English 
sonnet,  so  it  hardly  tried;  with  the  exception 
of  a  few  sonnets  in  the  Italian  form  of  Milton, 
the  century  can  show  us  nothing  in  this  mode  of 
verse.  The  literary  drama  was  brought  to  per- 
fection in  the  early  years  of  it  by  the  surviving 
Elizabethans;  later  decades  could  add  nothing  to 
it  but  licence,  and  as  we  saw,  the  licences  they 
added  hastened  its  destruction.  But  in  other 
forms  the  poets  of  the  new  time  experimented 
eagerly,  and  in  the  stress  of  experiment,  poetry 
which  under  Elizabeth  had  been  integral  and  co- 
herent split  into  different  schools.  As  the  period  of 
the  Renaissance  was  also  that  of  the  Reforma- 
tion it  was  only  natural  a  determined  effort  should 
sooner  or  later  be  made  to  use  poetry  for  religious 
purposes.  The  earliest  English  hymn  writing, 
our  first  devotional  verse  in  the  vernacular,  be- 
longs to  this  time,  and  a  Catholic  and  religious 
school  of  lyricism  grew  and  flourished  beside  the 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     89 

pagan  neo-classical  writers.  From  the  tumult 
of  experiment  three  schools  disengage  themselves, 
the  school  of  Spenser,  the  school  of  Jonson,  and 
the  school  of  Donne. 

At  the  outset  of  the  century  Spenser's  influence 
was  triumphant  and  predominant;  his  was  the 
main  stream  with  which  the  other  poetic  influen- 
ces of  the  time  merely  mingled.  His  popularity 
is  referable  to  qualities  other  than  those  which 
belonged  peculiarly  to  his  talent  as  a  poet.  Puri- 
tans loved  his  reUgious  ardour,  and  in  those 
Puritan  households  where  the  stricter  conception 
of  the  diabolical  nature  of  all  poetry  had  not  pene- 
trated, his  works  were  read — standing  on  a  shelf, 
may  be,  between  the  new  translation  of  the  Bible 
and  Sylvester's  translation  of  the  French  poet 
Du  Bartas'  work  on  the  creation,  that  had  a  large 
popularity  at  that  time  as  family  reading.  Prob- 
ably the  Puritans  were  as  blind  to  the  sensuousness 
of  Spenser's  language  and  imagery  as  they  were 
(and  are)  to  the  same  qualities  in  the  Bible  itself. 
The  Fairy  Queen  would  easily  achieve  innocuous- 
ness  amongst  those  who  can  find  nothing  but  an 
allegory  of  the  Church  in  the  "Song  of  Songs." 
His  followers  made  their  allegory  a  great  deal 
plainer  than  he  had  done  his.  In  his  poem  called 
The  Purple  Island,  Phineas  Fletcher,  a  Puritan 
imitator  of  Spenser  in  Cambridge,  essayed  to  set 
forth  the  struggle  of  the  soul  at  grip  with  evil, 
a  battle  in  which  the  body — the  "Purple  Island" 
— is  the  field.  To  a  modern  reader  it  is  a  deso- 
lating and  at  times  a  mildly  amusing  book,  in 
which  everything  from  the  liver  to  the  seven 
deadly  sins  is  personified;    in  which  after  four 


90   ENGLISH   LITERATURE— MODERN 

books  of  allegorized  contemporary  anatomy  and 
physiology,  the  will  (Voletta)  engages  in  a  strug- 
gle with  Satan  and  conquers  by  the  help  of  Christ 
and  King  James!  The  allegory  is  clever — too 
clever — and  the  author  can  paint  a  pleasant 
picture,  but  on  the  whole  he  was  happier  in  his 
pastoral  work.  His  brother  Giles  made  a  better 
attempt  at  the  Spenserian  manner.  His  long 
poem,  Christ's  Victory  and  Death,  shows  for  all 
its  carefully  Protestant  tone  high  qualities  of 
mysticism;  across  it  Spenser  and  Milton  join 
hands. 

It  was,  however,  in  pastoral  poetry  that  Spen- 
ser's influence  found  its  pleasantest  outlet.  One 
might  hesitate  to  advise  a  reader  to  embark  on 
either  of  the  Fletchers.  There  is  no  reason  why 
any  modern  should  not  read  and  enjoy  Browne 
or  Wither,  in  whose  softly  flowing  verse  the  sweet- 
ness and  contentment  of  the  countryside,  that 
"merry  England"  which  was  the  background  of 
all  sectarian  and  intellectual  strife  and  labour, 
finds  as  in  a  placid  stream  a  calm  reflection  and 
picture  of  itself.  The  seventeenth  century  gave 
birth  to  many  things  that  only  came  to  maturity 
in  the  nineteenth;  if  you  care  for  that  kind  of 
literary  study  which  searches  out  origins  and  digs 
for  hints  and  models  of  accepted  styles,  you  will 
find  in  Browne  that  which  influenced  more  than 
any  other  single  thing  the  early  work  of  Keats. 
Browne  has  another  claim  to  immortality;  if  it 
be  true  as  is  now  thought  that  he  was  the  author 
of  the  epitaph  on  the  Countess  of  Pembroke: 

"Underneath  this  sable  hearse 
Lies  the  subject  of  all  verse. 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     91 

Sidney's  sister,  Pembroke's  mother. 
Death,  ere  thou  hast  slain  another 
Fair  and  learned  and  good  as  she. 
Time  shall  throw  a  dart  at  thee." 

then  he  achieved  the  miracle  of  a  quintessential 
statement  of  the  spirit  of  the  English  Renais- 
sance. For  the  breath  of  it  stirs  in  these  slow 
quiet  moving  Unes,  and  its  few  and  simple  words 
implicate  the  soul  of  a  period. 

By  the  end  of  the  first  quarter  of  the  century 
the  influence  of  Spenser  and  the  school  which 
worked  under  it  had  died  out.  Its  place  was 
taken  by  the  twin  schools  of  Jonson  and  Donne. 
Jonson's  poetic  method  is  something  like  his 
dramatic;  he  formed  himself  as  exactly  as  pos- 
sible on  classical  models.  Horace  had  written 
satires  and  elegies,  and  epistles  and  complimentary 
verses,  and  Jonson  quite  consciously  and  de- 
liberately followed  where  Horace  led.  He  wrote 
elegies  on  the  great,  letters  and  courtly  com- 
pliments and  love-lyrics  to  his  friends,  satires 
with  an  air  of  general  censure.  But  though  he 
was  classical,  his  style  was  never  latinized.  In 
all  of  them  he  strove  to  pour  into  an  ancient 
form  language  that  was  as  intense  and  vigorous 
and  as  purely  English  as  the  earliest  trumpet- 
ers of  the  Renaissance  in  England  could  have 
wished.  The  result  is  not  entirely  successful.  He 
seldom  fails  to  reproduce  classic  dignity  and  good 
sense;  on  the  other  hand  he  seldom  succeeds 
in  achieving  classic  grace  and  ease.  Occasionally, 
as  in  his  best  known  lyric,  he  is  perfect  and 
achieves  an  air  of  spontaneity  little  short  of 
marvellous,    when    we    know    that    his    images 


92  ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

and  even  his  words  in  the  song  are  all  plagiarized 
from  other  men.  His  expression  is  always  clear 
and  vigorous  and  his  sense  good  and  noble.  The 
native  earnestness  and  sincerity  of  the  man 
shines  through  as  it  does  in  his  dramas  and  his 
prose.  In  an  age  of  fantastic  and  meaningless 
eulogy — eulogy  so  amazing  in  its  unexpected- 
ness and  abstruseness  that  the  wonder  is  not 
so  much  that  it  should  have  been  written  as 
that  it  could  have  been  thought  of — Jonson 
maintains  his  personal  dignity  and  his  good 
sense.  You  feel  his  compliments  are  such  as 
the  best  should  be,  not  necessarily  understood 
and  properly  valued  by  the  public,  but  of  a 
discriminating  sort  that  by  their  very  compre- 
hending sincerity  would  be  most  warmly  ap- 
preciated by  the  people  to  whom  they  were 
addressed.  His  verses  to  Shakespeare  and  his 
prose  commentaries  on  him  too,  are  models  of 
what  self-respecting  admiration  should  be,  gen- 
erous in  its  ^praise  of  excellence,  candid  in  its 
statement  of  defects.  They  are  the  kind  of  com- 
pliments that  Shakespeare  himself,  if  he  had  grace 
enough,  must  have  loved  to  receive. 

Very  different  from  his  direct  and  dignified 
manner  is  the  closely  packed  style  of  Donne, 
who,  Milton  apart,  is  the  greatest  English  writer 
of  the  century,  though  his  obscurity  has  kept 
him  out  of  general  reading.  No  poetry  in  English, 
not  even  Browning,  is  more  difficult  to  under- 
stand. The  obscurity  of  Donne  and  Browning 
proceed  from  such  similar  causes  that  they  are 
worth  examining  together.  In  both,  as  in  the 
obscure  passages  in  Shakespeare's  later  plays. 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     93 

obscurity  arises  not  because  the  poet  says  too 
little  but  because  he  attempts  to  say  too  much. 
He  huddles  a  new  thought  on  the  one  before  it, 
before  the  first  has  had  time  to  express  itself; 
he  sees  things  or  analyses  emotions  so  swiftly  and 
subtly  himself  that  he  forgets  the  slower  compre- 
hension of  his  readers;  he  is  for  analysing  things 
far  deeper  than  the  ordinary  mind  commonly  can. 
His  wide  and  curious  knowledge  finds  terms  and 
likenesses  to  express  his  meaning  unknown  to 
us;  he  sees  things  from  a  dozen  points  of  view 
at  once  and  tumbles  a  hint  of  each  separate 
vision  in  a  heap  out  on  to  the  page;  his  restless 
intellect  finds  new  and  subtler  shades  of  emotion 
and  thought  invisible  to  other  pairs  of  eyes,  and 
cannot,  because  speech  is  modelled  on  the  average 
of  our  intelHgences,  find  words  to  express  them; 
he  is  always  trembling  on  the  brink  of  the  inar- 
ticulate. All  this  applies  to  both  Donne  and 
Browning,  and  the  comparison  could  be  pushed 
further  still.  Both  draw  the  knowledge  which 
is  the  main  cause  of  their  obscurity  from  the  same 
source,  the  bypaths  of  medisevalism.  Browning's 
Sordello  is  obscure  because  he  knows  too  much 
about  mediaeval  Italian  history;  Donne's  Anni- 
versary because  he  is  too  deeply  read  in  medieval 
scholasticism  and  speculation.  Both  make  them- 
selves more  diflBcult  to  the  reader  who  is  familiar 
with  the  poetry  of  their  contemporaries  by  the 
disconcerting  freshness  of  their  point  of  view. 
Seventeenth  century  love  poetry  was  idyllic 
and  idealist;  Donne's  is  passionate  and  realistic 
to  the  point  of  cynicism.  To  read  him  after 
reading  Browne  or  Jonson  is  to  have  the  same 


94    ENGLISH   LITERATURE— MODERN 

shock  as  reading  Browning  after  Tennyson.  Both 
poets  are  salutary  in  the  strong  and  biting  anti- 
dote they  bring  to  sentimentalism  in  thought  and 
melodious  facility  in  writing.  They  are  the  cor- 
rective of  lazy  thinking  and  lazy  composition. 

Elizabethan  love  poetry  was  written  on  a 
convention  which  though  it  was  used  with  man- 
liness and  entire  sincerity  by  Sidney  did  not 
escape  the  fate  of  its  kind.  Dante's  love  for 
Beatrice,  Petrarch's  for  Laura,  the  gallant  and 
passionate  adoration  of  Sidney  for  his  Stella 
became  the  models  for  a  dismal  succession  of 
imaginary  woes.  They  were  all  figments  of  the 
mind,  perhaps  hardly  that;  they  all  use  the  same 
terms  and  write  in  fixed  strains,  epicurean  and 
sensuous  like  Ronsard,  ideal  and  intellectualized 
like  Dante,  sentimental  and  adoring  like  Petrarch. 
Into  this  enclosed  garden  of  sentiment  and  illusion 
Donne  burst  passionately  and  rudely,  pulling  up 
the  gay-coloured  tangled  weeds  that  choked 
thoughts,  planting,  as  one  of  his  followers  said, 
the  seeds  of  fresh  invention.  Where  his  fore- 
runners had  been  idealist,  epicurean,  or  adoring, 
he  was  brutal,  cynical  and  immitigably  realist. 
He  could  begin  a  poem,  "For  God's  sake  hold 
your  tongue  and  let  me  live";  he  could  be  as 
resolutely  free  from  illusion  as  Shakespeare  when 
he  addressed  his  Dark  Lady — 

"Hope  not  for  mind  in  women;  at  their  best. 
Sweetness  and  wit  they  're  but  mummy  possest." 

And  where  the  sonneteers  pretended  to  a 
sincerity  which  was  none  of  theirs,  he  was,  like 
Browning,   unaffectedly  a  dramatic  lyrist.     "I 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     95 

did  best,"  he  said,  "when  I  had  least  truth  for 
my  subject." 

His  love  poetry  was  written  in  his  turbulent 
and  brilliant  youth,  and  the  poetic  talent  which 
made  it  turned  in  his  later  years  to  express  itself 
in  hymns  and  religious  poetry.  But  there  is  no 
essential  distinction  between  the  two  halves  of 
his  work.  It  is  all  of  a  piece.  The  same  swift 
and  subtle  spirit  which  analyses  experiences  of 
passion,  analyses,  in  his  later  poetry,  those  of 
religion.  His  devotional  poems,  though  they 
probe  and  question,  are  none  the  less  never  ser- 
mons, but  rather  confessions  or  prayers.  His 
intense  individuality,  eager  always,  as  his  best 
critic  has  said,  "to  find  a  North- West  passage  of 
his  own,"  pressed  its  curious  and  sceptical  ques- 
tioning into  every  corner  of  love  and  life  and 
religion,  explored  unsuspected  depths,  exploited 
new  discovered  paradoxes,  and  turned  its  dis- 
coveries always  into  poetry  of  the  closely-packed 
artificial  style  which  was  all  its  own.  Sim- 
plicity indeed  would  have  been  for  him  an  affecta- 
tion; his  elaborateness  is  not  like  that  of  his 
followers,  constructed  painfully  in  a  vicious 
desire  to  compass  the  unexpected,  but  the  natural 
overflow  of  an  amazingly  fertile  and  ingenious 
mind.  The  curiosity,  the  desire  for  truth,  the 
search  after  minute  and  detailed  knowledge  of 
his  age  is  all  in  his  verse.  He  bears  the  spirit 
of  his  time  not  less  markedly  than  Bacon  does, 
or  Newton,  or  Descartes. 

The  work  of  the  followers  of  Donne  and  Jonson 
leads  straight  to  the  new  school,  Jonson's  by 
giving  that  school  a  model  on  which  to  work. 


96    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

Donne's  by  producing  an  era  of  extravagance  and 
absurdity  which  made  a  literary  revolution  im- 
perative. The  school  of  Donne — the  "fantastics" 
as  they  have  been  called  (Dr.  Johnson  called  them 
the  metaphysical  poets),  produced  in  Herbert 
and  Vaughan,  our  two  noblest  writers  of  religious 
verse,  the  flower  of  a  mode  of  writing  which 
ended  in  the  somewhat  exotic  religiousness  of 
Crashaw.  In  the  hands  of  Cowley  the  use  of  far- 
sought  and  intricate  imagery  became  a  trick,  and 
the  fantastic  school,  the  soul  of  sincerity  gone 
out  of  it,  died  when  he  died.  To  the  followers  of 
Jonson  we  owe  that  delightful  and  simple  lyric 
poetry  which  fills  our  anthologies,  their  courtly 
lyricism  receiving  a  new  impulse  in  the  intenser 
loyalty  of  troubled  times.  The  most  finished  of 
them  is  perhaps  Carew;  the  best,  because  of  the 
freshness  and  variety  of  his  subject-matter  and 
his  easy  grace,  Herrick.  At  the  end  of  them  came 
Waller  and  gave  to  the  five-accented  rhymed 
verse  (the  heroic  couplet)  that  trick  of  regularity 
and  balance  which  gave  us  the  classical  school. 


(3) 

The  prose  literature  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury is  extraordinarily  rich  and  varied,  and  a 
study  of  it  would  cover  a  wide  field  of  human 
knowledge.  The  new  and  unsuspected  harmo- 
nies discovered  by  the  Elizabethans  were  applied 
indeed  to  all  the  tasks  of  which  prose  is  capable, 
from  telling  stories  to  setting  down  the  results 
of  speculation  which  was  revolutionizing  science 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     97 

and  philosophy.  For  the  first  time  the  vernacular 
and  not  Latin  became  the  language  of  scientific 
research,  and  though  Bacon  in  his  Novum  Organum 
adhered  to  the  older  mode  its  disappearance 
was  rapid.  English  was  proving  itself  too  flexible 
an  instrument  for  conveying  ideas  to  be  longer 
neglected.  It  was  applied  too  to  preaching  of  a 
more  formal  and  grandiose  kind  than  the  plain 
and  homely  Latimer  ever  dreamed  of.  The 
preachers,  though  their  golden-mouthed  oratory, 
which  blended  in  its  combination  of  vigour  and 
cadence  the  euphuistic  and  colloquial  styles  of 
the  EUzabethans,  is  in  itself  a  glory  of  English 
literature,  belong  by  their  matter  too  exclusively 
to  the  province  of  Church  history  to  be  dealt 
with  here.  The  men  of  science  and  philosophy, 
Newton,  Hobbes,  and  Locke,  are  in  a  like  way 
outside  our  province.  For  the  purpose  of  the 
literary  student  the  achievement  of  the  seven- 
teenth century  can  be  judged  in  four  separate 
men  or  books — in  the  Bible,  in  Francis  Bacon, 
and  in  Burton  and  Browne. 

In  a  way  the  Bible,  like  the  preachers,  lies 
outside  the  domain  of  literary  study  in  the 
narrow  sense;  but  its  sheer  literary  magni- 
tude, the  abiding  significance  of  it  in  our  sub- 
sequent history,  social,  pohtical,  and  artistic  as 
well  as  religious,  compel  us  to  turn  aside  to  ex- 
amine the  causes  that  have  produced  such  great 
results.  The  Authorized  Version  is  not,  of  course, 
a  purely  seventeenth  century  work.  Though  the 
scholars^  who  wrote  and  compiled  it  had  before 

'  There  is  a  graphic  little  pen-picture  of  their  method  in 
Selden's  "Table  Talk." 


98    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

them  all  the  previous  vernacular  texts  and  chose 
the  best  readings  where  they  found  them  or  de- 
vised new  ones  in  accordance  with  the  original, 
the  basis  is  undoubtedly  the  Tudor  version  of 
Tindall.  It  has,  none  the  less,  the  qualities  of  the 
time  of  its  publication.  It  could  hardly  have  been 
done  earlier;  had  it  been  so,  it  would  not  have 
been  done  half  so  well.  In  it  English  has  lost  both 
its  roughness  and  its  aflPectation  and  retained  its 
strength;  the  Bible  is  the  supreme  example  of  early 
English  prose  style.  The  reason  is  not  far  to  seek. 
Of  all  recipes  for  good  or  noble  writing  that  which 
enjoins  the  writer  to  be  careful  about  the  matter 
and  never  mind  the  manner,  is  the  most  sure.  The 
translators  had  the  handling  of  matter  of  the 
gravest  dignity  and  momentousness,  and  their 
sense  of  reverence  kept  them  right  in  their  treat- 
ment of  it.  They  cared  passionately  for  the  truth; 
they  were  virtually  anonymous  and  not  ambitious 
of  originality  or  literary  fame;  they  had  no  desire 
to  stand  between  the  book  and  its  readers.  It 
followed  that  they  cultivated  that  naked  plain- 
ness and  spareness  which  makes  their  work  su- 
preme. The  Authorized  Version  is  the  last  and 
greatest  of  those  English  translations  which  were 
the  fruit  of  Renaissance  scholarship  and  pioneer- 
ing. It  is  the  first  and  greatest  piece  of  English 
prose. 

Its  influence  is  one  of  those  things  on  which 
it  is  profitless  to  comment  or  enlarge  simply 
because  they  are  an  understood  part  of  every 
man's  experience.  In  its  own  time  it  helped  to 
weld  England,  for  where  before  one  Bible  was 
read  at  home  and  another  in  churches,  all  now 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     99 

read  the  new  version.  Its  supremacy  was  instan- 
taneous and  unchallenged,  and  it  quickly  coloured 
speech  and  literature;  it  could  produce  a  Bunyan 
in  the  century  of  its  birth.  To  it  belongs  the 
native  dignity  and  eloquence  of  peasant  speech. 
It  runs  like  a  golden  thread  through  all  our  writ- 
ing subsequent  to  its  coming;  men  so  diverse 
as  Huxley  and  Carlyle  have  paid  their  tribute 
to  its  power;  Ruskin  counted  it  the  one  essential 
part  of  his  education.  It  will  be  a  bad  day  for 
the  mere  quality  of  our  language  when  it  ceases 
to  be  read. 

At  the  time  the  translators  were  sitting,  Francis 
Bacon  was  at  the  height  of  his  fame.  By  pro- 
fession a  lawyer — time-serving  and  over-compliant 
to  wealth  and  influence — he  gives  singularly  little 
evidence  of  it  in  the  style  of  his  books.  Lawyers, 
from  the  necessity  they  are  under  of  exerting 
persuasion,  of  planting  an  unfamiliar  argument 
in  the  minds  of  hearers  of  whose  favour  they 
are  doubtful,  but  whose  sympathy  they  must 
gain,  are  usually  of  purpose  diffuse.  They  cul- 
tivate the  gift,  possessed  by  Edmund  Burke 
above  all  other  English  authors,  of  putting  the 
same  thing  freshly  and  in  different  forms  a  great 
many  times  in  succession.  They  value  copious- 
ness and  fertility  of  illustration.  Nothing  could 
be  more  unlike  this  normal  legal  manner  than 
the  style  of  Bacon.  "No  man,"  says  Ben  Jon- 
son,  speaking  in  one  of  those  vivid  little  notes 
of  his,  of  his  oratorical  method,  "no  man  ever 
coughed  or  turned  aside  from  him  without 
loss."  He  is  a  master  of  the  aphoristic  style. 
He  compresses  his  wisdom  into  the  quintessen- 


100    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

tial  form  of  an  epigram;  so  complete  and  con- 
centrated is  his  form  of  statement,  so  shortly 
is  everything  put,  that  the  mere  transition 
from  one  thought  to  another  gives  his  prose  a 
curious  air  of  disjointedness  as  if  he  flitted  arbi- 
trarily from  one  thing  to  another,  and  jotted 
down  anything  that  came  into  his  head.  His 
writing  has  clarity  and  lucidity,  it  abounds  in 
terseness  of  expression  and  in  exact  and  dis- 
criminating phraseology,  and  in  the  minor 
arts  of  composition — in  the  use  of  quotations 
for  instance — it  can  be  extraordinarily  felici- 
tous. But  it  lacks  spaciousness  and  ease  and 
rhythm;  it  makes  too  inexorable  a  demand  on 
the  attention,  and  the  harassed  reader  soon 
finds  himself  longing  for  those  breathing  spaces 
which  consideration  or  perhaps  looseness  of 
thought  has  implanted  in  the  prose  of  other 
writers. 

His  Essays,  the  work  by  which  he  is  best 
known,  were  in  their  origin  merely  jottings 
gradually  cohered  and  enlarged  into  the  series 
we  know.  In  them  he  had  the  advantage  of  a 
subject  which  he  had  studied  closely  through 
life.  He  counted  himself  a  master  in  the  art  of 
managing  men,  and  "Human  Nature  and  how 
to  manage  it"  would  be  a  good  title  for  his  book. 
Men  are  studied  in  the  spirit  of  Machiavelli, 
whose  philosophy  of  government  appealed  so 
powerfully  to  the  Elizabethan  mind.  Taken 
together  the  essays  which  deal  with  public  matters 
are  in  eflFect  a  kind  of  manual  for  statesmen 
and  princes,  instructing  them  how  to  acquire 
power  and  how  to  keep  it,   deliberating  how 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  101 

far  they  may  go  safely  in  the  direction  of  self- 
interest,  and  to  what  degree  the  principle  of 
self-interest  must  be  subordinated  to  the  wider 
interests  of  the  people  who  are  ruled.  Democ- 
racy, which  in  England  was  to  make  its  splendid 
beginnings  in  the  seventeenth  century,  finds 
little  to  foretell  it  in  the  works  of  Bacon.  Though 
he  never  advocates  cruelty  or  oppression  and 
is  wise  enough  to  see  that  no  statesman  can 
entirely  set  aside  moral  considerations,  his  eth- 
ical tone  is  hardly  elevating;  the  moral  obliquity 
of  his  public  life  is  to  a  certain  extent  explained, 
in  all  but  its  grosser  elements,  in  his  published 
writings.  The  essays,  of  course,  contain  much 
more  than  this;  the  spirit  of  curious  and  rest- 
less enquiry  which  animated  Bacon  finds  expres- 
sion in  those  on  "Health,"  or  "Gardens"  and 
"Plantations"  and  others  of  the  kind;  and  a 
deeper  vein  of  earnestness  runs  through  some  of 
them — those  for  instance  on  "Friendship,"  or 
"Truth"  and  on  "Death." 

The  Essays  sum  up  in  a  condensed  form  the 
intellectual  interests  which  find  larger  treatment 
in  his  other  works.  His  Henry  VII.,  the  first 
piece  of  scientific  history  in  the  English  language 
(indeed  in  the  modern  world)  is  concerned  with 
a  king  whose  practice  was  the  outcome  of  a 
political  theory  identical  with  Bacon's  own.  The 
Advancement  of  Learning  is  a  brilliant  popular 
exposition  of  the  cause  of  scientific  enquiry 
and  of  the  inductive  or  investigatory  method  of 
research.  The  New  Atlantis  is  the  picture  of  an 
ideal  community  whose  common  purpose  is  sci- 
entific investigation.    Bacon's  name  is  not  upon 


102    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

the  roll  of  those  who  have  enlarged  by  brilliant 
conjectures  or  discoveries  the  store  of  human 
knowledge;  his  own  investigations  so  far  as 
they  are  recorded  are  all  of  a  trivial  nature.  The 
truth  about  hini  is  that  he  was  a  brilliantly  clever 
populariser  of  the  cause  of  science,  a  kind  of 
seventeenth  century  Huxley,  concerned  rather 
to  lay  down  large  general  principles  for  the 
guidance  of  the  work  of  others,  than  to  be  a 
serious  worker  himself.  The  superstition  of  later 
times,  acting  on  and  refracting  his  amazing  intel- 
lectual gifts,  has  raised  him  to  a  godlike  eminence 
which  is  by  right  none  of  his;  it  has  even  credited 
him  with  the  authorship  of  Shakespeare,  and 
in  its  wilder  moments  with  the  composition  of 
all  that  is  of  supreme  worth  in  Elizabethan  liter- 
ature. It  is  not  necessary  to  take  these  delu- 
sions seriously.  The  ignorance  of  mediae valism 
was  in  the  habit  of  crediting  Vergil  with  the 
construction  of  the  Roman  aqueducts  and  tem- 
ples whose  ruins  are  scattered  over  Europe. 
The  modern  Baconians  reach  much  the  same 
intellectual  level. 

A  similar  enthusiasm  for  knowledge  and  at 
any  rate  a  pretence  to  science  belong  to  the  author 
of  the  Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  Robert  Burton. 
His  one  book  is  surely  the  most  amazing  in  English 
prose.  Its  professed  object  was  simple  and  com- 
prehensive; it  was  to  analyse  human  melancholy, 
to  describe  its  effects,  and  prescribe  for  its  removal. 
But  as  his  task  grew,  melancholy  came  to  mean 
to  Burton  all  the  ills  that  flesh  is  heir  to.  He 
tracked  it  in  obscure  and  unsuspected  forms; 
drew  illustrations  from  a  range  of  authors  so 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  103 

much  wider  than  the  compass  of  the  reading  of 
even  the  most  learned  since,  that  he  is  generally 
credited  with  the  invention  of  a  large  part  of 
his  quotations.  Ancients  and  modems,  poets 
and  prose  writers,  schoolmen  and  dramatists 
are  all  drawn  upon  for  the  copious  store  of  his 
examples;  they  are  always  cited  with  an  air  of 
quietly  humorous  shrewdness  in  the  comments 
and  enclosed  in  a  prose  that  is  straightforward, 
simple  and  vigorous,  and  can  on  occasion  com- 
mand both  rhythm  and  beauty  of  phrase.  It  is 
a  mistake  to  regard  Burton  from  the  point  of 
view  (due  largely  to  Charles  Lamb)  of  tolerant 
or  loving  delight  in  quaintness  for  quaintness' 
sake.  His  book  is  anything  but  scientific  in 
form,  but  it  is  far  from  being  the  work  of  a  recluse 
or  a  fool.  Behind  his  lack  of  system,  he  takes  a 
broad  and  psychologically  an  essentially  just 
view  of  human  ills,  and  modern  medicine  has 
gone  far  in  its  admiration  of  what  is  at  bottom 
a  most  comprehensive  and  subtle  treatise  in 
diagnosis. 

A  writer  of  a  very  different  quality  is  Sir 
Thomas  Browne.  Of  all  the  men  of  his  time,  he 
is  the  only  one  of  whom  one  can  say  for  certain 
that  he  held  the  manner  of  saying  a  thing  more 
important  than  the  thing  said.  He  is  our  first 
deliberate  and  conscious  stylist,  the  forerunner 
of  Charles  Lamb,  of  Stevenson  (whose  Virginibus 
Puerisque  is  modelled  on  his  method  of  treatment) 
and  of  the  stylistic  school  of  our  own  day.  His 
eloquence  is  too  studied  to  rise  to  the  greatest 
heights,  and  his  speculation,  though  curious  and 
discursive,  never  really  results  in  deep  thinking. 


104    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

He  is  content  to  embroider  his  pattern  out  of  the 
stray  fancies  of  an  imaginative  nature.  His  best 
known  work,  the  Religio  Medici,  is  a  random 
confession  of  belief  and  thoughts,  full  of  the 
inconsequent  speculations  of  a  man  with  some 
knowledge  of  science  but  not  deeply  or  earnestly 
interested  about  it,  content  rather  to  follow  the 
wayward  imaginations  of  a  mind  naturally  gifted 
with  a  certain  poetic  quality,  than  to  engage  in 
serious  intellectual  exercise.  Such  work  could 
never  maintain  its  hold  on  taste  if  it  were  not 
carefully  finished  and  constructed  with  elaborate 
care.  Browne,  if  he  was  not  a  great  writer,  was 
a  literary  artist  of  a  high  quality.  He  exploits 
a  quaint  and  lovable  egoism  with  extraordinary 
skill;  and  though  his  delicately  figured  and  lat- 
inized sentences  commonly  sound  platitudinous 
and  trivial  when  they  are  translated  into  rough 
Saxon  prose,  as  they  stand  they  are  rich  and  melo- 
dious enough. 

(4) 

In  a  century  of  surpassing  richness  in  prose 
and  poetry,  one  author  stands  by  himself. 
John  Milton  refuses  to  be  classed  with  any  of 
the  schools.  Though  Dryden  tells  us  Milton 
confessed  to  him  that  Spenser  was  his  "origi- 
nal," he  has  no  connection — other  than  a  gen- 
eral similarity  of  purpose,  moral  and  religious 
• — with  Spenser's  followers.  To  the  fantastics 
he  paid  in  his  youth  the  doubtful  compliment 
of  one  or  two  half -contemptuous  imitations  and 
never  touched  them  again.  He  had  no  turn  for 
the  love  lyrics  or  the  courtliness  of  the  school  of 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  105 

Jonson.  In  everything  he  did  he  was  himself 
and  his  own  master;  he  devised  his  own  subjects 
and  wrote  his  own  style.  He  stands  alone  and 
must  be  judged  alone. 

No  author,  however,  can  ever  escape  from 
the  influences  of  his  time,  and,  just  as  much  as 
his  lesser  contemporaries,  Milton  has  his  place 
in  literary  history  and  derives  from  the  great 
original  impulse  which  set  in  motion  all  the 
enterprises  of  the  century.  He  is  the  last  and 
greatest  figure  in  the  English  Renaissance.  The 
new  passion  for  art  and  letters  which  in  its  earnest 
fumbling  beginnings  gave  us  the  prose  of  Cheke 
and  Ascham  and  the  poetry  of  Surrey  and  Sack- 
ville,  comes  to  a  full  and  splendid  and  perfect 
end  in  his  work.  In  it  the  Renaissance  and  the 
Reformation,  imperfectly  fused  by  Sidney  and 
Spenser,  blend  in  their  just  proportions.  The 
transplantation  into  English  of  classical  forms 
which  had  been  the  aim  of  Sidney  and  the  endeav- 
our of  Jonson  he  finally  accomplished;  in  his 
work  the  dream  of  all  the  poets  of  the  Renaissance 
— the  heroic  poem — ^finds  its  fulfilment.  There 
was  no  poet  of  the  time  but  wanted  to  do  for  his 
country  what  Vergil  had  planned  to  do  for 
Rome,  to  sing  its  origins,  and  to  celebrate  its 
morality  and  its  citizenship  in  the  epic  form. 
Spenser  had  tried  it  in  The  Fairy  Queen  and 
failed  splendidly.  Where  he  failed,  Milton 
succeeded,  though  his  poem  is  not  on  the  origins 
of  England  but  on  the  ultimate  subject  of  the 
origins  of  mankind.  We  know  from  his  note- 
books that  he  turned  over  in  his  mind  a  national 
subject  and  that  the  Arthurian  legend  for  a  while 


106    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

appealed  to  him.  But  to  Milton's  earnest  tem- 
per nothing  that  was  not  true  was  a  fit  sub- 
ject for  poetry.  It  was  inevitable  he  should 
lay  it  aside.  The  Arthurian  story  he  knew  to  be 
a  myth  and  a  myth  was  a  lie;  the  story  of  the 
Fall,  on  the  other  hand,  he  accepted  in  common 
with  his  time  for  literal  fact.  It  is  to  be  noted 
as  characteristic  of  his  confident  and  assured 
egotism  that  he  accepted  no  less  sincerely  and 
literally  the  imaginative  structure  which  he  him- 
self reared  on  it.  However  that  may  be,  the 
solid  fact  about  him  is  that  in  this  "adventurous 
song"  with  its  pursuit  of 

"Things  unattempted  yet  in  prose  or  rhyme," 

he  succeeded  in  his  attempt,  that  alone  among 
the  moderns  he  contrived  to  write  an  epic  which 
stands  on  the  same  eminence  as  the  ancient 
writings  of  the  kind,  and  that  he  found  time  in 
a  life,  which  hardly  extended  to  old  age  as  we 
know  it,  to  write,  besides  noble  lyrics  and  a  series 
of  fiercely  argumentative  prose  treatises,  two 
other  masterpieces  in  the  grand  style,  a  tragedy 
modelled  on  the  Greeks  and  a  second  epic  on 
the  "compact"  style  of  the  book  of  Job.  No 
English  poet  can  compare  with  him  in  majesty 
or  completeness. 

An  adequate  study  of  his  achievement  is 
impossible  within  the  limits  of  the  few  pages 
that  are  all  a  book  like  this  can  spare  to  a 
single  author.  Readers  who  desire  it  will  find 
it  in  the  work  of  his  two  best  critics,  Mark 
Pattison    and    Sir    Walter  Raleigh.^      All    that 

1  "Milton,"  E.  M.  L.,  and  "Milton"  (Edward  Arnold). 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  107 

can  be  done  here  is  to  call  attention  to  some 
of  his  most  striking  qualities.  Foremost,  of 
course,  is  the  temper  of  the  man.  From  the 
beginning  he  was  sure  of  himself  and  sure  of  his 
mission;  he  had  his  purpose  plain  and  clear. 
There  is  no  mental  development,  hardly,  visible 
in  his  work,  only  training,  undertaken  anxiously 
and  prayerfully  and  with  a  clearly  conceived  end. 
He  designed  to  write  a  masterpiece  and  he  would 
not  start  till  he  was  ready.  The  first  twenty 
years  of  his  life  were  spent  in  assiduous  reading; 
for  twenty  more  he  was  immersed  in  the  dust 
and  toil  of  political  conflict,  using  his  pen  and 
his  extraordinary  equipment  of  learning  and 
eloquence  to  defend  the  cause  of  liberty,  civil 
and  religious,  and  to  attack  its  enemies;  not  till 
he  was  past  middle  age  had  he  reached  the  leisure 
and  the  preparedness  necessary  to  accomplish 
his  self-imposed  work.  But  all  the  time,  as  we 
know,  he  had  it  in  his  mind.  In  Lycidas,  written 
in  his  Cambridge  days,  he  apologizes  to  his  readers 
for  plucking  the  fruit  of  his  poetry  before  it  is 
ripe.  In  passage  after  passage  in  his  prose  works 
he  begs  for  his  reader's  patience  for  a  little  while 
longer  till  his  preparation  be  complete.  When  the 
time  came  at  last  for  beginning  he  was  in  no 
doubt;  in  his  very  opening  lines  he  intends, 
he  says,  to  soar  no  "middle  flight."  This  self- 
assured  unrelenting  certainty  of  his,  carried  into 
his  prose  essays  in  argument,  produces  sometimes 
strange  results.  One  is  peculiarly  interesting  to 
us  now  in  view  of  current  controversy.  He  was 
unhappily  married,  and  because  he  was  unhappy 
the  law  of  divorce  must  be  changed.    A  modern — 


108    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

George  Eliot  for  instance — ^would  have  pleaded 
the  artistic  temperament  and  been  content  to 
remain  outside  the  law.  Milton  always  argued 
from  himself  to  mankind  at  large. 

In  everything  he  did,  he  put  forth  all  his 
strength.  Each  of  his  poems,  long  or  short,  is  by 
itself  a  perfect  whole,  wrought  complete.  The 
reader  always  must  feel  that  the  planning  of  each 
is  the  work  of  conscious,  deliberate,  and  selecting 
art.  Milton  never  digresses;  he  never  violates 
harmony  of  sound  or  sense;  his  poems  have  all 
their  regular  movement  from  quiet  beginning 
through  a  rising  and  breaking  wave  of  passion 
and  splendour  to  quiet  close.  His  art  is  nowhere 
better  seen  than  in  his  endings. 

Is  it  Lycidas  ?  After  the  thunder  of  approach- 
ing vengeance  on  the  hireling  shepherds  of  the 
Church,  comes  sunset  and  quiet: 

"And  now  the  sun  had  stretch'd  out  all  the  hills. 
And  now  was  dropt  into  the  western  bay; 
At  last  he  rose,  and  twitched  his  mantle  blue: 
To-morrow  to  fresh  woods  and  pastures  new." 

Is  it  Paradise  Lost  ?  After  the  agonies  of  ex- 
pulsion and  the  flaming  sword — 

"  Some  natural  tears  they  drop'd,  but  wip'd  them  soon; 
The  world  was  all  before  them  where  to  choose 
Their  place  of  rest,  and  Providence  their  guide; 
They  hand  in  hand  with  wandering  steps  and  slow. 
Through  Eden  took  their  solitary  way." 

Is  it  finally  Samson  Agonistes  ? 

"  His  servants  he  with  new  acquist. 
Of  true  experience  from  this  great  event. 
With  peace  and  consolation  hath  dismist. 
And  calm  of  mind  all  passion  spent." 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       109 

"Calm  of  mind  all  passion  spent,"  it  is  the 
essence  of  Milton's  art. 

He  worked  in  large  ideas  and  painted  splendid 
canvases;  it  was  necessary  for  him  to  invent  a 
style  which  should  be  capable  of  sustained  and 
lofty  dignity,  which  should  be  ornate  enough  to 
maintain  the  interest  of  the  reader  and  charm 
him  and  at  the  same  time  not  so  ornate  as  to 
give  an  air  of  meretricious  decoration  to  what 
was  largely  and  simply  conceived.  Particularly 
it  was  necessary  for  him  to  avoid  those  incur- 
sions of  vulgar  associations  which  words  carelessly 
used  will  bring  in  their  train.  He  succeeded  bril- 
liantly in  this  difficult  task.  The  unit  of  the 
Miltonic  style  is  not  the  phrase  but  the  word, 
each  word  fastidiously  chosen,  commonly  with 
some  air  of  an  original  and  lost  meaning  about  it, 
and  all  set  in  a  verse  in  which  he  contrived  by  an 
artful  variation  of  pause  and  stress  to  give  the 
variety  which  other  writers  had  from  rhyme.  In 
this  as  in  his  structure  he  accomplished  what  the 
Renaissance  had  only  dreamed.  Though  he  had 
imitators  (the  poetic  diction  of  the  age  following 
is  modelled  on  him)  he  had  no  followers.  No  one 
has  been  big  enough  to  find  his  secret  since. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE 

The  student  of  literature,  when  he  passes  in 
his  reading  from  the  age  of  Shakespeare  and 
Milton  to  that  of  Dryden  and  Pope,  will  be 


110    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

conscious  of  certain  sharply  defined  differences 
between  the  temper  and  styles  of  the  writers 
of  the  two  periods.  If  besides  being  a  student  of 
literature  he  is  also  (for  this  is  a  different  thing) 
a  student  of  literary  criticism  he  will  find  that 
these  differences  have  led  to  the  affixing  of  cer- 
tain labels — that  the  school  to  which  writers  of 
the  former  period  belong  is  called  "Romantic" 
and  that  of  the  latter  "Classic,"  this  "Classic" 
school  being  again  overthrown  towards  the  end 
of  the  eighteenth  century  by  a  set  of  writers  who 
unlike  the  Elizabethans  gave  the  name  "Ro- 
mantic "  to  themselves.  What  is  he  to  understand 
by  these  two  labels;  what  are  the  characteristics 
of  "Classicism"  and  how  far  is  it  opposite  to 
and  conflicting  with  "  Romanticism  "  ?  The  ques- 
tion is  difficult  because  the  names  are  used  vaguely 
and  they  do  not  adequately  cover  everything  that 
is  commonly  put  under  them.  It  would  be  diffi- 
cult, for  instance,  to  find  anything  in  Ben  Jonson 
which  proclaims  him  as  belonging  to  a  different 
school  from  Dryden,  and  perhaps  the  same  could 
be  said  in  the  second  and  self-styled  period  of 
Romanticism  of  the  work  of  Crabbe.  But  in 
the  main  the  differences  are  real  and  easily  visible, 
even  though  they  hardly  convince  us  that  the 
names  chosen  are  the  happiest  that  could  be 
found  by  way  of  description. 

(This  period  of  Dryden  and  Pope  on  which 
we  are  now  entering  sometimes  styled  itself  the 
Augustan  Age  of  English  poetry.  It  grounded 
its  claim  to  classicism  on  a  fancied  resemblance 
\to  the  Roman  poets  of  the  golden  age  of  Latin 
poetry,  the  reign  of  the  Emperor  Augustus.     Its 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       111 

authors  saw  themselves  each  as  a  second  Vergil, 
a  second  Ovid,  most  of  all  a  second  Horace,  and 
they  believed  that  their  relation  to  the  big 
world,  their  assured  position  in  society,  height- 
ened the  resemblances.  They  endeavoured  to 
form  their  poetry  on  the  lines  laid  down  in  the 
critical  writing  of  the  original  Augustan  age  as 
elaborated  and  interpreted  in  Renaissance  criti- 
cism. It  was  tacitly  assumed — some  of  them 
openly  asserted  it — that  the  kinds,  modes  of 
treatment  and  all  the  minor  details  of  literature, 
figures  of  speech,  use  of  epithets  and  the  rest, 
had  been  settled  by  the  ancients  once  and  for 
all.  What  the  Greeks  began  the  critics  and 
authors  of  the  time  of  Augustus  had  settled  in 
its  completed  form,  and  the  scholars  of  the 
Renaissance  had  only  interpreted  their  findings 
for  modern  use.  There  was  the  tragedy,  which 
had  certain  proper  parts  and  a  certain  fixed  order 
of  treatment  laid  down  for  it;  there  was  the  heroic 
poem,  which  had  a  story  or  "fable,"  which  must 
be  treated  in  a  certain  fixed  manner,  and  so  on. 
The  authors  of  the  "Classic"  period  so  christened 
themselves  because  they  observed  these  rules. 
And  they  fancied  that  they  had  the  temper  of 
the  Augustan  time — the  temper  displayed  in  the 
works  of  Horace  more  than  in  those  of  any  one 
else — its  urbanity,  its  love  of  good  sense  and  mod- 
eration, its  instinctive  distrust  of  emotion,  and  its 
invincible  good  breeding.  If  you  had  asked  them 
to  state  as  simply  and  broadly  as  possible  their 
purpose  they  would  have  said  it  was  to  follow 
nature,  and  if  you  had  enquired  what  they  meant 
by  nature  it  would  turn  out  that  they  thought 


112    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

of  it  mainly  as  the  opposite  of  art  and  the  negation 
of  what  was  fantastic,  tortured,  or  far  sought 
in  thinking  or  writing.  The  later  "Romantic" 
Revival,  when  it  called  itself  a  return  to  nature, 
was  only  claiming  the  intention  which  the  clas- 
sical school  itself  had  proclaimed  as  its  main  en- 
deavour. The  explanation  of  that  paradox  we 
shall  see  presently;  in  the  meantime  it  is  worth 
looking  at  some  of  the  characteristics  of  classicism 
as  they  appear  in  the  work  of  the  "Classic" 
authors. 

In  the  first  place  the  "Classic"  writers  aimed 
at  simplicity  of  style,  at  a  normal  standard  of 
writing.    They  were  intolerant  of  individual  ec- 
centricities;  they   endeavoured,   and   with    suc- 
1  cess,  to  infuse  into  English  letters  something  of 
I  the  academic   spirit   that  was   already  control- 
)  ling  their  fellow-craftsmen  in  France.     For  this 
V*-  end  amongst  others  they  and  the  men  of  science 
I   foimded  the  Royal  Society,  an  academic  com- 
\  mittee  which  has  been  restricted  since  to  the 
•  physical  and  natural  sciences  and  been  supple- 
mented by  similar  bodies  representing  literature 
and  learning  only  in  our  own  day.     Clearness, 
plainness,   conversational    ease    and    directness 
were  the  aims  the  society  set  before  its  mem- 
bers where  their  writing  was  concerned.     "The 
;  Royal  Society,"  wrote  the  Bishop  of  Rochester, 
its  first  historian,  "have  exacted  from  all  their 
members  a  close,  naked,  natural  way  of  speak- 
ing;  positive  expressions,  clear  sense,  a  native 
easiness,  bringing  all  things  as  near  the  math- 
ematical plainness  as  they  can;  and  preferring 
the  language  of  artisans,  countrymen,  and  mer- 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       113 

chants  before  that  of  wits  and  scholars."  Arti- 
sans, countrymen,  and  merchants — the  ideal  had 
been  already  accepted  in  France,  Malesherbes 
striving  to  use  no  word  that  was  not  in  the 
vocabulary  of  the  day  labourers  of  Paris,  Moliere 
making  his  washerwoman  first  critic  of  his  come- 
dies. It  meant  for  England  the  disuse  of  the 
turgidities  and  involutions  which  had  marked 
the  prose  of  the  preachers  and  moralists  of  the 
times  of  James  and  Charles  I.;  scholars  and 
men  of  letters  were  arising  who  would  have 
taken  John  Bunyan,  the  unlettered  tinker  of 
Bedford,  for  their  model  rather  than  the  learned 
physician  Sir  Thomas  Browne. 

But  genius  hke  Bunyan's  apart,  there  is 
nothing  in  the  world  more  difficult  than  to 
write  with  the  easy  and  forthright  simplicity  of 
talk,  as  any  one  may  see  who  tries  for  himself 
— or  even  compares  the  letter-writing  with  the 
conversation  of  his  friends.  So  that  this  desire 
of  simplicity,  of  clarity,  of  lucidity  led  at  once 
to  a  more  deliberate  art.  Dryden  and  Swift  and 
Addison  were  assiduous  in  their  labour  with  the 
file;  they  excel  all  their  predecessors  in  polish  as 
much  as  the  writers  of  the  first  Augustan  age 
excelled  theirs  in  the  same  quahty.  Not  that  it 
was  all  the  result  of  deliberate  art;  in  a  way  it 
was  in  the  air,  and  quite  unlearned  people — ■ 
journalists  and  pamphleteers  and  the  like  who 
wrote  unconsciously  and  hurriedly  to  buy  their 
supper — partook  of  it  as  well  as  leisured  people 
and  conscious  artists.  Defoe  is  as  plain  and 
easy  and  polished  as  Swift,  yet  it  is  certain 
his  amazing  activity  and  productiveness  never 


114    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

permitted  him  to  look  back  over  a  sentence  he 
had  written.  Something  had  happened,  that  is,  to 
the  EngUsh  language.  The  assimilation  of  latin- 
isms  and  the  revival  of  obsolete  terms  of  speech 
had  ceased;  it  had  become  finally  a  more  or  less 
fixed  form,  shedding  so  much  of  its  imports  as 
it  had  failed  to  make  part  of  itself  and  acquiring 
a  grammatical  and  syntactical  fixity  which  it 
had  not  possessed  in  Elizabethan  times.  When 
Shakespeare  wrote 

"What  cares  these  roarers  for  the  name  of  king," 

he  was  using,  as  students  of  his  language  never 
tire  of  pointing  out  to  us,  a  perfectly  correct  local 
grammatical  form.  Fifty  years  after  that  Une  was 
written,  at  the  Restoration,  local  forms  had  dropped 
out  of  written  English.  We  had  acquired  a  nor- 
mal standard  of  language,  and  either  genius  or 
labour  was  polishing  it  for  literary  uses. 

What  they  did  for  prose  these  "Classic" 
writers  did  even  more  exactly — and  less  happily 
— ^for  verse.  Fashions  often  become  exaggerated 
before  their  disappearance,  and  the  decadence 
of  Elizabethan  romanticism  had  produced  poetry 
the  wildness  and  extravagance  of  whose  images 
was  well-nigh  unbounded.  The  passion  for  intri- 
cate and  far-sought  metaphor  which  had  pos- 
sessed Donne  was  accompanied  in  his  work  and 
even  more  in  that  of  his  followers  with  a  passion 
for  what  was  elusive  and  recondite  in  thought 
and  emotion  and  with  an  increasing  habit  of 
rudeness  and  wilful  difficultness  in  language 
and  versification.  Against  these  ultimate  licences 
of  a  great  artistic  period,  the  classical  writers 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       115 

invoked  the  qualities  of  smoothness  and  lucidity, 
in  the  same  way,  so  they  fancied,  as  Vergil 
might  have  invoked  them  against  Lucretius.  In 
the  treatment  of  thought  and  feeling  they  wanted 
clearness,  they  wanted  ideas  which  the  mass  of 
men  would  readily  apprehend  and  assent  to, 
and  they  wanted  not  hints  or  half-spoken  sug- 
gestions but  complete  statement.  In  the  place 
of  the  logical  subtleties  which  Donne  and  his 
school  had  sought  in  the  scholastic  writers  of 
the  Middle  Ages,  they  brought  back  the  typi- 
cally Renaissance  study  of  rhetoric;  the  charac- 
teristic of  all  the  poetry  of  the  period  is  that  it 
has  a  rhetorical  quality.  It  is  never  intimate 
and  never  profound,  but  it  has  point  and  wit, 
and  it  appeals  with  confidence  to  the  balanced 
judgment  which  men  who  distrust  emotion  and 
have  no  patience  with  subtleties  intellectual, 
emotional,  or  merely  verbal,  have  in  common. 
Alongside  of  this  lucidity,  this  air  of  complete 
statement  in  substance,  they  strove  for  and 
achieved  smoothness  in  form.  To  the  poet 
Waller,  the  immediate  predecessor  of  Dryden, 
the  classical  writers  themselves  ascribed  the 
honour  of  the  innovation.  In  fact  Waller  was 
only  carrying  out  the  ideals  counselled  and 
followed  by  Ben  Jonson.  It  was  in  the  school 
of  Waller  and  Dryden  and  not  in  that  of  the 
minor  \\Titers  who  called  themselves  his  followers 
that  he  came  to  his  own. 

What  then  are  the  main  differences  between 
classicism  of  the  best  period — the  classicism 
whose  characteristics  we  have  been  describing — 
and  the  Bomanticism  which  came  before  and 


116    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

after?  In  the  first  place  we  must  put  the  quality 
we  have  described  as  that  of  complete  statement. 
Classical  poetry  is,  so  to  speak,  "all  there." 
Its  meaning  is  all  of  it  on  the  surface;  it  con- 
veys nothing  but  what  it  says,  and  what  it  says, 
it  says  completely.  It  is  always  vigorous  and 
direct,  often  pointed  and  aphoristic,  never  merely 
suggestive,  never  given  to  half  statement,  and 
never  obscure.  You  feel  that  as  an  instrument 
of  expression  it  is  sharp  and  polished  and  shining; 
it  is  always  bright  and  defined  in  detail.  The 
Great  Romantics  go  to  work  in  other  ways. 
Their  poetry  is  a  thing  of  half  lights  and  half 
spoken  suggestions,  of  hints  that  imagination 
will  piece  together,  of  words  that  are  charged 
with  an  added  meaning  of  sound  over  sense,  a 
thing  that  stirs  the  vague  and  impalpable  rest- 
lessness of  memory  or  terror  or  desire  that  lies 
down  beneath  in  the  minds  of  men.  It  rouses 
what  a  philosopher  has  called  the  "Transcen- 
dental feeling,"  the  solemn  sense  of  the  imme- 
diate presence  of  "that  which  was  and  is  and 
ever  shall  be,"  to  induce  which  is  the  property  of 
the  highest  poetry.  You  will  find  nothing  in 
classical  poetry  so  poignant  or  highly  wrought  as 
Webster's 

"Cover  her  face;  mine  eyes  dazzle;  she  died  young," 

and  the  answer, 

"I  think  not  so:  her  infelicity 
Seemed  to  have  years  too  many," 

or  so  subtle  in  its  suggestion,  sense  echoing  back 
to  primeval  terrors  and  despairs,  as  this  from 
Macbeth: 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE        117 

"Stones  have  been  known  to  move  and  trees  to  speak; 
Augurs  and  understood  relations  have 
By  magot-pies,  and  choughs,  and  rooks  brought  forth 
The  secret'st  man  of  blood." 

or  SO  intoxicating  to  the  imagination  and  the 
senses  as  an  ode  of  Keats  or  a  sonnet  by  Rossetti. 
But  you  will  find  eloquent  and  pointed  state- 
ments of  thoughts  and  feelings  that  are  common 
to  most  of  us — the  expression  of  ordinary  human 
nature — 

"What  oft  was  thought  but  ne'er  so  well  exprest," 

"Wit  and  fine  writing"  consisting,  as  Addison 
put  it  in  a  review  of  Pope's  first  published  poem, 
not  so  much  "in  advancing  things  that  are  new,  as 
in  giving  things  that  are  known  an  agreeable  turn." 

Though  in  this  largest  sense  the  "classic" 
writers  eschewed  the  vagueness  of  romanticism, 
in  another  and  more  restricted  way  they  culti- 
vated it.  They  were  not  realists  as  all  good  roman- 
ticists have  to  be.  They  had  no  love  for  oddities 
or  idiosyncrasies  or  exceptions.  They  loved  uni- 
formity, they  had  no  use  for  truth  in  detail.  They 
liked  the  broad  generalised,  descriptive  style  of 
Milton,  for  instance,  better  than  the  closely 
packed  style  of  Shakespeare,  which  gets  its  effects 
from  a  series  of  minute  observations  huddled  one 
after  the  other  and  giving  the  reader,  so  to  speak, 
the  materials  for  his  own  impression,  rather  than 
rendering,  as  does  Milton,  the  expression  itself. 

Every  literary  discovery  hardens  ultimately 
into  a  convention;  it  has  its  day  and  then  its 
work  is  done,  and  it  has  to  be  destroyed  so 
that  the  ascending  spirit  of  humanity  can  find 


118    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

a  better  means  of  self-expression.  Out  of  the 
writing  which  aimed  at  simpHcity  and  truth  to 
nature  grew  "Poetic  Diction,"  a  special  treasury 
of  words  and  phrases  deemed  suitable  for  poetry, 
providing  poets  with  a  common  stock  of  imagery, 
removing  from  them  the  necessity  of  seeing  life 
and  nature  each  one  for  himself.  The  poetry 
which  Dryden  and  Pope  wrought  out  of  their 
mental  vigour,  their  followers  wrote  to  pattern. 
Poetry  became  reduced,  as  it  never  was  before 
and  has  never  been  since,  to  a  formula.  The 
Elizabethan  sonneteers,  as  we  saw,  used  a  vocab- 
ulary^ and  phraseology  in  common  with  their 
fellows  in  Italy  and  France,  and  none  the  less 
produced  fine  poetry.  But  they  used  it  to  express 
things  they  really  felt.  The  truth  is  it  is  not 
the  fact  of  a  poetic  diction  which  matters  so  much 
as  its  quahty — whether  it  squares  with  sincerity, 
whether  it  is  capable  of  expressing  powerfully 
and  directly  one's  deepest  feelings.  The  history 
of  literature  can  show  poetic  dictions — special 
vocabularies  and  forms  for  poetry — that  have 
these  qualities;  the  diction,  for  instance,  of  the 
Greek  choruses,  or  of  the  Scottish  poets  who 
followed  Chaucer,  or  of  the  troubadours.  That 
of  the  classic  writers  of  an  Augustan  age  was 
not  of  such  a  kind.  Words  clothe  thought; 
poetic  diction  had  the  artifice  of  the  crinoline;  it 
would  stand  by  itself.  The  Romantics  in  their 
return  to  nature  had  necessarily  to  abolish  it. 

But  when  all  is  said  in  criticism  the  poetry 
of  the  earlier  half  of  the  eighteenth  century 
excels  all  other  English  poetry  in  two  respects. 
Two  'jualities  belong  to  it  by  virtue  of  the  metre 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       119 

in  which  it  is  most  of  it  written — rapidity  and 
antithesis.  Its  antithesis  made  it  an  incompar- 
able vehicle  for  satire,  its  rapidity  for  narrative. 
Outside  its  limits  we  have  hardly  any  even 
passable  satirical  verse;  within  them  there  are 
half-a-dozen  works  of  the  highest  excellence  in 
this  kind.  And  if  we  except  Chaucer,  there  is  no 
one  else  in  the  whole  range  of  English  poetry 
who  has  the  narrative  gift  so  completely  as  the 
classic  poets,  Bentleys  will  always  exist  who  will 
assure  us  with  civility  that  Pope's  Homer,  though 
"very  pretty,"  bears  little  relation  to  the  Greek, 
and  that  Dryden's  Vergil,  though  vigorous  and 
virile,  is  a  poor  representation  of  its  original. 
The  truth  remains  that  for  a  reader  who  knows 
no  ancient  languages  either  of  those  translations 
will  probably  give  a  better  idea  of  their  originals 
than  any  other  rendering  in  English  that  we 
possess.  The  foundation  of  their  method  has 
been  vindicated  in  the  best  modern  translations 
from  the  Greek. 

(2) 

The  term  "eighteenth  century"  in  the  vocabu- 
lary of  the  literary  historian  is  commonly  as 
vaguely  used  as  the  term  Elizabethan.  It  bor- 
rows as  much  as  forty  years  from  the  seventeenth 
and  gives  away  ten  to  the  nineteenth.  The  whole 
of  the  work  of  Dryden,  whom  we  must  count  as 
the  first  of  the  "  classic"  school,  was  accomplished 
before  chronologically  it  had  begun.  As  a  man 
and  as  an  author  he  was  very  intimately  related 
to  his  changing  times;    he  adapted  himself  to 


120    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

them  with  a  versatility  as  remarkable  as  that  of 
the  Vicar  of  Bray,  and,  it  may  be  added,  as  simple- 
minded.  He  mourned  in  verse  the  death  of 
Cromwell  and  the  death  of  his  successor,  succes- 
sively defended  the  theological  positions  of  the 
Church  of  England  and  the  Church  of  Rome, 
changed  his  religion  and  became  Poet  Laureate 
to  James  II.,  and  acquiesced  with  perfect  equanim- 
ity in  the  Revolution  which  brought  in  his  suc- 
cessor. This  instability  of  conviction,  though  it 
gave  a  handle  to  his  opponents  in  controversy, 
does  not  appear  to  have  caused  any  serious  scandal 
or  disgust  among  his  contemporaries,  and  it  has 
certainly  had  little  effect  on  the  judgment  of 
later  times.  It  has  raised  none  of  the  reproaches 
which  have  been  cast  at  the  suspected  apostasy 
of  Wordsworth.  Dryden  had  little  interest  in 
political  or  religious  questions;  his  instinct,  one 
must  conceive,  was  to  conform  to  the  prevailing 
mode  and  to  trouble  himself  no  further  about 
the  matter.  Defoe  told  the  truth  about  him 
when  he  wrote  that  "Dryden  might  have  been 
told  his  fate  that,  having  his  extraordinary  gen- 
ius slung  and  pitched  upon  a  swivel,  it  would 
certainly  turn  round  as  fast  as  the  times,  and 
instruct  him  how  to  write  elegies  to  Oliver 
Cromwell  and  King  Charles  the  Second  with 
all  the  coherence  imaginable;  how  to  write 
Religio  Laid  and  the  Hind  and  the  Panther  and 
yet  be  the  same  man,  every  day  to  change  his 
principle,  change  his  religion,  change  his  coat, 
change  his  master,  and  yet  never  change  his 
nature."  He  never  changed  his  nature,  he 
was  as  free  from  cynicism  as  a  barrister  who 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       121 

represents  successively  opposing  parties  in  suits 
or  politics;  and  when  he  wrote  polemics  in  prose 
or  verse  he  lent  his  talents  as  a  barrister  lends  his 
for  a  fee.  His  one  intellectual  interest  was  in  his 
art,  and  it  is  in  his  comments  on  his  art — the 
essays  and  prefaces  in  the  composition  of  which  he 
amused  the  leisure  left  in  the  busy  life  of  a 
dramatist  and  a  poet  of  officialdom — that  his 
most  charming  and  delicate  work  is  to  be  found. 
In  a  way  they  begin  modern  English  prose; 
earlier  writing  furnishes  no  equal  to  their  collo- 
quial ease  and  the  grace  of  their  expression. 
And  they  contain  some  of  the  most  acute  criticism 
in  our  language — "classical"  in  its  tone  (i.  e., 
with  a  preference  for  conformity)  but  with  its 
respect  for  order  and  tradition  always  tempered 
by  good  sense  and  wit,  and  informed  and  guided 
throughout  by  a  taste  whose  catholicity  and 
sureness  was  unmatched  in  the  England  of  his 
time.  The  preface  to  his  Fables  contains  some 
excellent  notes  on  Chaucer.  They  may  be  read 
as  a  sample  of  the  breadth  and  perspicuity  of 
his  critical  perceptions. 

His  chief  poetical  works  were  most  of  them 
occasional — designed  either  to  celebrate  some  re- 
markable event  or  to  take  a  side  and  interpret 
a  policy  in  the  conflict,  political  or  religious, 
of  the  time.  Absalom  and  Achitophel  and  The 
Medal  were  levelled  at  the  Shaftesbury-Mon- 
mouth intrigues  in  the  closing  years  of  Charles 
II.  Religio  Laid  celebrated  the  excellence  of 
the  Church  of  England  in  its  character  of  via 
media  between  the  opposite  extravagances  of 
Papacy    and   Presbyterianism.      The   Hind   and 


122    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

the  Panther  found  this  perfection  spotted.  The 
Church  of  England  has  become  the  Panther, 
whose  coat  is  a  varied  pattern  of  heresy  and 
truth  beside  the  spotless  purity  of  the  Hind,  the 
Church  of  Rome.  Astrea  Reddux  welcomed  the 
returning  Charles;  Annus  Mirabilis  commemo- 
rated a  year  of  fire  and  victories.  Besides 
these  he  wrote  many  dramas  in  verse,  a  num- 
ber of  translations,  and  some  shorter  poems,  of 
which  the  odes  are  the  most  remarkable. 

His  qualities  as  a  poet  fitted  very  exactly 
the  work  he  set  himself  to  do.  His  work  is 
always  plain  and  easily  understood;  he  had 
a  fine  faculty  for  narration,  and  the  vigorous 
rapidity  and  point  of  his  style  enabled  him  to 
sketch  a  character  or  sum  up  a  dialectical  posi- 
tion very  surely  and  effectively.  His  writing  has 
a  kind  of  spare  and  masculine  force  about  it. 
It  is  this  vigour  and  the  impression  which  he 
gives  of  intellectual  strength  and  of  a  logical 
grasp  of  his  subject,  that  beyond  question  has 
kept  alive  work  which,  if  ever  poetry  was,  was 
ephemeral  in  its  origin.  The  careers  of  the 
unscrupulous  Caroline  peers  would  have  been 
closed  for  us  were  they  not  visible  in  the  reflected 
light  of  his  denunciation  of  them.  Though 
Buckingham  is  forgotten  and  Shaftesbury's 
name  swallowed  up  in  that  of  his  more  phil- 
anthropic descendant,  we  can  read  of  Achito- 
phel  and  Zimri  still,  and  feel  something  of 
the  strength  and  heat  which  he  caught  from 
a  fiercely  fought  conflict  and  transmitted  with 
his  own  gravity  and  purposefulness  into  verse. 
The  Thirty-nine  Articles  are  not  a  proper  sub- 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       123 

ject  for  poetry,  but  the  sustained  and  serious 
allegory  which  Dryden  weaves  round  theo- 
logical discussion  preserves  his  treatment  of 
them  from  the  fate  of  the  controversialists  who 
opposed  him.  His  work  has  wit  and  vitality 
enough  to  keep  it  sweet. 

Strength  and  wit  enter  in  different  propor- 
tions into  the  work  of  his  successor,  Alexander 
Pope — a  poet  whom  admirers  in  his  own  age 
held  to  be  the  greatest  in  our  language.  No 
one  would  think  of  making  such  a  claim  now, 
but  the  detraction  which  he  sufiFered  at  the  hands 
of  Wordsworth  and  the  Romantics,  ought  not 
to  make  us  forget  that  Pope,  though  not  our 
greatest,  not  even  perhaps  a  great,  poet  is  in- 
comparably our  most  brilliant  versifier.  Dry- 
den's  strength  turns  in  his  work  into  something 
more  fragile  and  delicate,  polished  with  infinite 
care  like  lacquer,  and  wrought  like  filigree  work 
to  the  last  point  of  conscious  and  perfected 
art.  He  was  not  a  great  thinker;  the  thoughts 
which  he  embodies  in  his  philosophical  poems — 
the  Essay  on  Man  and  the  rest,  are  almost  ludi- 
crously out  of  proportion  to  the  solemnity  of 
the  titles  which  introduce  them,  nor  does  he 
except  very  rarely  get  beyond  the  conceptions 
common  to  the  average  man  when  he  attempts 
introspection  or  meditates  on  his  own  destiny. 
The  reader  in  search  of  philosophy  will  find 
little  to  stimulate  him  and  in  the  facile  Deism 
of  the  time  probably  something  to  smile  at. 
Pope  has  no  message  to  us  now.  But  he  will 
find  views  current  in  his  time  or  borrowed  from 
other  authors  put  with  perfect  felicity  and  wit. 


124    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

and  he  will  recognize  the  justice  of  Addison's 
comment  that  Pope's  wit  and  fine  writing  con- 
sist "not  so  much  in  advancing  things  that  are 
new,  as  in  giving  things  that  are  known  an  agree- 
able turn."  And  he  will  not  fall  into  the  error 
of  dubbing  the  author  a  minor  poet  because 
he  is  neither  subtle  nor  imaginative  nor  pro- 
found. A  great  poet  would  not  have  written 
like  Pope — one  must  grant  it;  but  a  minor  poet 
could  not. 

It  is  characteristic  of  Pope's  type  of  mind  and 
kind  of  art  that  there  is  no  development  vis- 
ible in  his  work.  Other  poets,  Shakespeare,  for 
instance,  and  Keats,  have  written  work  of  the 
highest  quality  when  they  were  young,  but  they 
have  had  crudenesses  to  shed — things  to  get  rid 
of  as  their  strength  and  perceptions  grew.  But 
Pope,  like  Minerva,  was  full  grown  and  full  armed 
from  the  beginning.  If  we  did  not  know  that  his 
Essay  on  Criticism  was  his  first  poem  it  would  be 
impossible  to  place  it  in  the  canon  of  his  work; 
it  might  come  in  anywhere  and  so  might  every- 
thing else  that  he  wrote.  From  the  beginning  his 
craftsmanship  was  perfect;  from  the  beginning  he 
took  his  subject-matter  from  others  as  he  found 
it  and  worked  it  up  into  aphorism  and  epigram 
till  each  line  shone  like  a  cut  jewel  and  the  essen- 
tial commonplaceness  and  poverty  of  his  material 
was  obscured  by  the  glitter  the  craftsmanship 
lent  to  it.  Subject  apart,  however,  he  was  quite 
sure  of  his  medium  from  the  beginning;  it  was 
not  long  before  he  found  the  way  to  use  it  to 
most  brilhant  purpose.  The  Rape  of  the  Lock 
and  the  satirical  poems  come  later  in  his  career. 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE      125 

As  a  satirist  Pope,  though  he  did  not  hit  so 
hard  as  Dryden,  struck  more  deftly  and  probed 
deeper.  He  wielded  a  rapier  where  the  other 
used  a  broadsword,  and  though  both  used  their 
weapons  with  the  highest  skill  and  the  metaphor 
must  not  be  imagined  to  impute  clumsiness  to 
Dryden,  the  rapier  made  the  cleaner  cut.  Both 
employed  a  method  in  satire  which  their  suc- 
cessors (a  poor  set)  in  England  have  not  been 
intelligent  enough  to  use.  They  allow  every 
possible  good  point  to  the  object  of  their  attack. 
They  appear  to  deal  him  an  even  and  regretful 
justice.  His  good  points,  they  put  it  in  effect, 
being  so  many,  how  much  blacker  and  more 
deplorable  his  meannesses  and  faults!  They  do 
not  do  this  out  of  charity;  there  was  very  little  of 
the  milk  of  human  kindness  in  Pope.  Deformity 
in  his  case,  as  in  so  many  in  truth  and  fiction, 
seemed  to  bring  envy,  hatred,  malice  and  all 
uncharitableness  in  its  train.  The  method  is 
employed  simply  because  it  gives  the  maximum 
satirical  effect.  That  is  why  Pope's  epistle  to 
Arbuthnot,  with  its  characterisation  of  Addison, 
is  the  most  damning  piece  of  invective  in  our 
language. 

The  Rape  oj  Hie  Lock  is  an  exquisite  piece  of 
workmanship,  breathing  the  very  spirit  of  the 
time.  You  can  fancy  it  like  some  clock  made 
by  one  of  the  Louis  XIV.  craftsmen,  encrusted 
with  a  heap  of  ormolu  mock-heroics  and  im- 
pertinences and  set  perfectly  to  the  time  of  day. 
From  no  other  poem  could  you  gather  so  fully 
and  perfectly  the  temper  of  the  society  in  which 
our  "classic"  poetry  was  brought  to  perfection. 


126    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

its  elegant  assiduity  in  trifles,  its  brilliant  artifice, 
its  paint  and  powder  and  patches  and  high-heeled 
shoes,  its  measured  strutting  walk  in  life  as  well 
as  in  verse.  The  Rape  of  the  Lock  is  a  mock-heroic 
poem;  that  is  to  say  it  appUes  the  form  and 
treatment  which  the  "classic"  critics  of  the 
seventeenth  century  had  laid  down  as  belong- 
ing to  the  "heroic"  or  "epic"  style  to  a  trifling 
circumstance — the  loss  by  a  young  lady  of  fash- 
ion of  a  lock  of  hair.  And  it  is  the  one  in- 
stance in  which  this  "recipe"  for  a  heroic  poem 
which  the  French  critics  handed  on  to  Dryden, 
and  Dryden  left  to  his  descendants,  has  been 
used  well-enough  to  keep  the  work  done  with 
it  in  memory.  In  a  way  it  condemns  the  poetical 
theory  of  the  time;  when  forms  are  fixed,  new 
writing  is  less  likely  to  be  creative  and  more 
likely  to  exhaust  itself  in  the  ingenious  but 
trifling  exercises  of  parody  and  burlesque.  The 
Rape  of  the  Lock  is  brilliant  but  it  is  only  play. 

The  accepted  theory  which  assumed  that  the 
•forms  of  poetry  had  been  settled  in  the  past 
and  existed  to  be  applied,  though  it  concerned 
itself  mainly  with  the  ancient  writers,  included 
also  two  moderns  in  its  scope.  You  were  orthodox 
if  you  wrote  tragedy  and  epic  as  Horace  told 
you  and  satire  as  he  had  shown  you;  you  were 
also  orthodox  if  you  wrote  in  the  styles  of  Spen- 
ser or  Milton.  Spenser,  though  his  predecessors 
were  counted  barbaric  and  his  followers  tor- 
tured and  obscure,  never  fell  out  of  admiration; 
indeed  in  every  age  of  English  poetry  after  him 
the  greatest  poet  in  it  is  always  to  be  found 
copying  him  or  expressing  their  love  for  him — 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       127 

Milton  declaring  to  Dryden  that  Spenser  was 
his  "original,"  Pope  reading  and  praising  him, 
Keats  writing  his  earliest  work  in  close  imi- 
tation. His  characteristic  style  and  stanza 
were  recognised  by  the  classic  school  as  a  dis- 
tinct "kind"  of  poetry  which  might  be  used 
where  the  theme  fitted  instead  of  the  heroic 
manner,  and  Spenserian  imitations  abound. 
Sometimes  they  are  serious;  sometimes,  like 
Shenstone's  Schoolmistress,  they  are  mocking  and 
another  illustration  of  the  dangerous  ease  with 
which  a  conscious  and  sustained  effort  to  write 
in  a  fixed  and  acquired  style  runs  to  seed  in 
burlesque.  Milton's  fame  never  passed  through 
the  period  of  obscurity  that  sometimes  has  been 
imagined  for  him.  He  had  the  discerning  ad- 
miration of  Dryden  and  others  before  his  death. 
But  to  Addison  belongs  the  credit  of  introducing 
him  to  the  writers  of  this  time;  his  papers  in 
the  Spectator  on  Paradise  Lost,  with  their  eulogy 
of  its  author's  sublimity,  spurred  the  interest 
of  the  poets  among  his  readers.  From  Milton 
the  eighteenth  century  got  the  chief  and  most 
ponderous  part  of  its  poetic  diction,  high-sound- 
ing periphrases  and  borrowings  from  Latin  used 
without  the  gravity  and  sincerity  and  fullness 
of  thought  of  the  master  who  brought  them  in. 
When  they  wrote  blank  verse,  the  classic  poets 
wrote  it  in  the  Milton  manner. 

The  use  of  these  two  styles  may  be  studied 
in  the  writings  of  one  man,  James  Thomson. 
For  besides  acquiring  a  kind  of  anonymous 
immortality  with  patriots  as  the  author  of 
"Rule,  Britannia,"  Thomson  wrote  two  poems 


128  ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

respectively  in  the  Spenserian  and  the  Miltonic 
manner,  the  former  The  Castle  of  Indolence,  the 
latter  The  Seasons.  The  Spenserian  manner  is 
caught  very  effectively,  but  the  adoption  of 
the  style  of  Paradise  Lost,  with  its  allusive- 
ness,  circumlocution  and  weight,  removes  any 
freshness  the  Seasons  might  have  had,  had  the 
circumstances  in  them  been  put  down  as  they 
were  observed.  As  it  is,  hardly  anything  is 
directly  named;  birds  are  always  the  "feathered 
tribe"  and  everything  else  has  a  similar  polite 
generality  for  its  title.  Thomson  was  a  simple- 
minded  man,  with  a  faculty  for  watching  and 
enjoying  nature  which  belonged  to  few  in  his 
sophisticated  age;  it  is  unfortunate  he  should 
have  spent  his  working  hours  in  rendering  the 
fruit  of  country  rambles  freshly  observed  into  a 
cold  and  stilted  diction.  It  suited  the  eighteenth 
century  reader  well,  for  not  understanding 
nature  herself  he  was  naturally  obliged  to  read 
her  in  translations. 


(3) 

The  chief  merits  of  "classic"  poetry — its  clear- 
ness, its  vigour,  its  direct  statement — are  such 
as  belong  theoretically  rather  to  prose  than  to 
poetry.  In  fact,  it  was  in  prose  that  the  most 
vigorous  intellect  of  the  time  found  itself.  We 
have  seen  how  Dryden,  reversing  the  habit  of 
other  poets,  succeeded  in  expressing  his  personality 
not  in  poetry  which  was  his  vocation,  but  in  prose 
which  was  the  amusement  of  his  leisure  hours. 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       129 

Spenser  had  put  his  poUtics  into  prose  and  his 
ideals  into  verse;  Dryden  wrote  his  poHtics — 
to  order — in  verse,  and  in  prose  set  down  the 
thoughts  and  fancies  which  were  the  deepest 
part  of  him  because  they  were  about  his  art. 
The  metaphor  of  parentage,  though  honoured 
by  use,  fits  badly  on  to  Uterary  history;  none 
the  less  the  tradition  which  describes  him  as  the 
father  of  modern  Enghsh  prose  is  very  near  the 
truth.  He  puts  into  practice  for  the  first  time 
the  ideals,  described  in  the  first  chapter  of  this 
book,  which  were  set  up  by  the  scholars  who 
let  into  Enghsh  the  light  of  the  Renaissance. 
With  the  exception  of  the  dialogue  on  Dramatic 
Poesy,  his  work  is  almost  all  of  it  occasional, 
the  fruit  of  the  mood  of  a  moment,  and  written 
rather  in  the  form  of  a  causeHe,  a  kind  of  in- 
formal talk,  than  of  a  considered  essay.  And  it 
is  all  couched  in  clear,  flowing,  rather  loosely 
jointed  English,  carefully  avoiding  rhetoric  and 
eloquence  and  striving  always  to  reproduce  the 
ease  and  flow  of  cultured  conversation,  rather 
than  the  tighter,  more  closely  knit  style  of  con- 
sciously "literary"  prose.  His  methods  were  the 
methods  of  the  four  great  prose-writers  who 
followed  him — Defoe,  Addison,  Steele,  and  Swift. 
Of  these  Defoe  was  the  eldest  and  in  some 
ways  the  most  remarkable.  He  has  been  called 
the  earliest  professional  author  in  our  language, 
and  if  that  is  not  strictly  true,  he  is  at  any  rate 
the  earliest  literary  journalist.  His  output  of 
work  was  enormous;  he  wrote  on  any  and 
every  subject;  there  was  no  event  whether  in 
pohtics  or  letters  or  discovery  but  he  was  not 


130    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

ready  with  something  pat  on  it  before  the  public 
interest  faded.  It  followed  that  at  a  time  when 
imprisonment,  mutilation,  and  the  pillory  took 
the  place  of  our  modern  libel  actions  he  had 
an  adventurous  career.  In  politics  he  followed 
the  Whig  cause  and  served  the  Government  with 
his  pen,  notably  by  his  writings  in  support  of 
the  union  with  Scotland,  in  which  he  won  over 
the  Scots  by  his  description  of  the  commercial 
advantage  which  would  follow  the  abolition  of 
the  border.  This  Une  of  argument,  taken  at  a 
time  when  the  governing  of  political  tendencies  by 
commercial  interests  was  by  no  means  the  ac- 
cepted commonplace  it  is  now,  proves  him  a  man 
of  an  active  and  original  mind.  His  originality, 
indeed,  sometimes  over-reached  the  comprehen- 
sion both  of  the  public  and  his  superiors;  he 
was  imprisoned  for  an  attack  on  the  Hanoverian 
succession  which  was  intended  ironically;  ap- 
parently he  was  ignorant  of  what  every  journalist 
ought  to  know  that  irony  is  at  once  the  most 
dangerous  and  the  most  ineffectual  weapon  in  the 
whole  armoury  of  the  press.  The  fertility  and 
ingenuity  of  his  intellect  may  be  best  gauged 
by  the  number  of  modern  enterprises  and  con- 
trivances that  are  foreshadowed  in  his  work. 
Here  are  a  few,  all  utterly  unknown  in  his  own 
day,  collected  by  a  student  of  his  works;  a 
Board  of  Trade  register  for  seamen;  factories 
for  goods;  agricultural  credit  banks;  a  com- 
mission of  enquiry  into  bankruptcy;  and  a 
system  of  national  poor  relief.  They  show  him 
to  have  been  an  independent  and  courageous 
thinker  where  social  questions  were  concerned. 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       131 

He  was  nearly  sixty  before  he  had  published 
his  first  novel,  Robinson  Crusoe,  the  book  by 
which  he  is  universally  known,  and  on  which 
with  the  seven  other  novels  which  followed  it 
the  foundation  of  his  literary  fame  rests.  But 
his  earlier  works — they  are  reputed  to  number 
over  two  hundred — possess  no  less  remarkable 
literary  qualities.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say 
that  all  the  gifts  which  are  habitually  recom- 
mended for  cultivation  by  those  who  aspire 
to  journalistic  success  are  to  be  found  in  his 
prose.  He  has  in  the  first  place  the  gift  of  perfect 
lucidity  no  matter  how  complicated  the  subject 
he  is  expounding;  such  a  book  as  his  Complete 
English  Tradesman  is  full  of  passages  in  which 
complex  and  difficult  subject-matter  is  set  forth 
so  plainly  and  clearly  that  the  least  literate  of 
his  readers  could  have  no  doubt  of  his  under- 
standing it.  He  has  also  an  amazingly  exact 
acquaintance  with  the  technicalities  of  all  kinds 
of  trades  and  professions;  none  of  our  writers, 
not  even  Shakespeare,  shows  half  such  a  knowl- 
edge of  the  circumstances  of  life  among  different 
ranks  and  conditions  of  men;  none  of  them 
has  realized  with  such  fidelity  how  so  many 
different  persons  lived  and  moved.  His  gift 
of  narrative  and  description  is  masterly,  as 
readers  of  his  novels  know  (we  shall  have  to 
come  back  to  it  in  discussing  the  growth  of 
the  English  novel);  several  of  his  works  show 
him  to  have  been  endowed  with  a  fine  faculty 
of  psychological  observation.  Without  the  least 
consciousness  of  the  value  of  what  he  was  writing, 
nor  indeed  with  any  deliberate  artistic  intention. 


132    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

he  made  himself  one  of  the  masters  of  English 
prose. 

Defoe  had  been  the  champion  of  the  Whigs; 
on  the  Tory  side  the  ablest  pen  was  that  of 
Jonathan  Swift.  His  works  proclaim  him  to 
have  had  an  intellect  less  wide  in  its  range  than 
that  of  his  antagonist  but  more  vigorous  and 
powerful.  He  wrote,  too,  more  carefully.  In  his 
youth  he  had  been  private  secretary  to  Sir  William 
Temple,  a  writer  now  as  good  as  forgotten  because 
of  the  triviality  of  his  matter,  but  in  his  day 
esteemed  because  of  the  easy  urbanity  and  polish 
of  his  prose.  From  him  Swift  learned  the  labour 
of  the  file,  and  he  declared  in  later  life  that  it  was 
"generally  beheved  that  this  author  has  advanced 
our  English  tongue  to  as  great  a  perfection  as 
it  can  well  bear."  In  fact  he  added  to  the  ease 
and  cadences  he  had  learned  from  Temple  quali- 
ties of  vigour  and  directness  of  his  own  which 
put  his  work  far  above  his  master's.  And  he 
dealt  with  more  important  subject-matter  than 
the  academic  exercises  on  which  Temple  exercised 
his  fastidious  and  meticulous  powers  of  revision. 

In  temperament  he  is  opposed  to  all  the 
writers  of  his  time.  There  is  no  doubt  but 
there  was  some  radical  disorder  in  his  system; 
brain  disease  clouded  his  intellect  in  his  old 
age,  and  his  last  years  were  death  in  life;  right 
through  his  life  he  was  a  savagely  irritable,  sar- 
donic, dark  and  violent  man,  impatient  of  the 
slightest  contradiction  or  thwarting,  and  given 
to  explosive  and  instantaneous  rage.  He  de- 
lighted in  flouting  convention,  gloried  in  out- 
raging decency.     The  rage,  which,  as  he  said 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE        133 

himself,  tore  his  heart  out,  carried  him  to  strange 
excesses.  There  is  something  ironical  (he  would 
himself  have  appreciated  it)  in  the  popularity 
of  Gtdliver's  Travels  as  a  children's  book — that 
ascending  wave  of  savagery  and  satire  which 
overwhelms  policy  and  learning  to  break  against 
the  ultimate  citadel  of  humanity  itself.  In  none 
of  his  contemporaries  (except  perhaps  in  the 
sentimentalities  of  Steele)  can  one  detect  the 
traces  of  emotion;  to  read  Swift  is  to  be  con- 
scious of  intense  feeling  on  almost  every  page. 
The  surface  of  his  style  may  be  smooth  and 
equable  but  the  central  fires  of  passion  are  never 
far  beneath,  and  through  cracks  and  fissures 
come  intermittent  bursts  of  flame.  Defoe's 
irony  is  so  measured  and  studiously  common- 
place that  perhaps  those  who  imprisoned  him 
because  they  believed  him  to  be  serious  are 
hardly  to  be  blamed;  Swift's  quivers  and  reddens 
with  anger  in  every  line. 

But  his  pen  seldom  slips  from  the  strong  grasp 
of  his  controlling  art.  The  extraordinary  skill 
and  closeness  of  his  allegorical  writings — un- 
matched in  their  kind — is  witness  to  the  care 
and  sustained  labour  which  went  to  their  making. 
He  is  content  with  no  general  correspondences; 
his  allegory  does  not  fade  away  into  a  story 
in  which  only  the  main  characters  have  a  sec- 
ondary significance;  the  minutest  circumstances 
have  a  bearing  in  the  satire  and  the  moral.  In 
The  Tale  of  a  Tub  and  in  Gulliver's  Travels — 
particularly  in  the  former — the  multitude  as  well 
as  the  aptness  of  the  parallels  between  the 
imaginary  narrative  and  the  facts  it  is  meant  to 


134    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

represent  is  unrivalled  in  works  of  the  kind.  Only 
the  highest  mental  powers,  working  with  intense 
fervour  and  concentration,  could  have  achieved 
the  sustained  brilliancy  of  the  result.  "What 
a  genius  I  had  when  I  wrote  that  book! "  Swift 
is  said  to  have  exclaimed  in  his  old  age  when  he 
re-read  TJie  Tale  of  a  Tub,  and  certainly  the  book 
is  a  marvel  of  constructive  skill,  all  the  more 
striking  because  it  makes  allegory  out  of  history 
and  consequently  is  denied  that  freedom  of  nar- 
rative so  brilliantly  employed  in  the  Travels. 

Informing  all  his  writings  too,  besides  intense 
feeling  and  an  omnipresent  and  controlling  art, 
is  strong  common  sense.  His  aphorisms,  both 
those  collected  under  the  heading  of  Thoughts  on 
Various  Subjects,  and  countless  others  scattered 
up  and  down  his  pages,  are  a  treasury  of  sound, 
if  a  Uttle  sardonic,  practical  wisdom.  His  most 
insistent  prejudices  foreshadow  in  their  essential 
sanity  and  justness  those  of  that  great  master 
of  life,  Dr.  Johnson.  He  could  not  endure 
over-politeness,  a  vice  which  must  have  been 
very  oppressive  in  society  of  his  day.  He  sav- 
agely resented  and  condemned  a  display  of  af- 
fection— particularly  marital  affection — in  public. 
In  an  age  when  it  was  the  normal  social  sys- 
tem of  settling  quarrels,  he  condemned  duelhng; 
and  he  said  some  very  wise  things — things  that 
might  still  be  said — on  modern  education.  In 
economics  he  was  as  right-hearted  as  Ruskin 
and  as  wrong-headed.  Carlyle,  who  was  in  so 
many  respects  an  echo  of  him,  found  in  a  pas- 
sage in  his  works  a  "dim  anticipation"  of  his 
philosophy  of  clothes. 


THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE        135 

The  leading  literary  invention  of  the  period 
— after  that  of  the  heroic  couplet  for  verse — was 
the  prose  periodical  essay.  Defoe,  it  is  hardly 
necessary  to  say,  began  it;  it  was  his  nature  to 
be  first  with  any  new  thing:  but  its  establishment 
as  a  prevailing  literary  mode  is  due  to  two  authors, 
Joseph  Addison  and  Richard  Steele.  Of  the  two 
famous  series — the  Toiler  and  the  Spectator — 
for  which  they  were  both  responsible,  Steele 
must  take  the  first  credit;  he  began  them,  and 
though  Addison  came  in  and  by  the  deftness 
and  Ughtness  of  his  writing  took  the  lion's  share 
of  their  popularity,  both  the  plan  and  the  char- 
acters rovmd  whom  the  bulk  of  the  essays  in  the 
Spectator  came  to  revolve  were  the  creation  of 
his  collaborator.  Steele  we  know  very  intimately 
from  his  own  writings  and  from  Thackeray's 
portrait  of  him.  He  was  an  emotional,  full- 
blooded  kind  of  man,  reckless  and  dissipated 
but  fundamentally  honest  and  good-hearted — 
a  type  very  common  in  his  day  as  the  novels 
show,  but  not  otherwise  to  be  found  in  the  ranks 
of  its  writers.  What  there  is  of  pathos  and 
sentiment,  and  most  of  what  there  is  of  humour 
in  the  Toiler  and  the  Spectator  are  his.  And 
he  created  the  dramatis  personce  out  of  whose 
adventures  the  slender  thread  of  continuity 
which  binds  the  essays  together  is  woven.  Addi- 
son, though  less  open  to  the  onslaughts  of  the 
conventional  moralist,  was  a  less  lovable  person- 
ality. Constitutionally  endowed  with  little  vital- 
ity he  suflFered  mentally  as  well  as  bodily  from 
languor  and  lassitude.  His  lack  of  enthusiasm, 
his  cold-blooded  formalism,  caused  comment  even 


136    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

in  an  age  which  prided  itself  in  self-command 
and  decorum. 

His  very  malevolence  proceeded  from  a  flac- 
cidity  which  meanly  envied  the  activities  and 
enthusiasms  of  other  men.  As  a  writer  he  was 
•superficial;  he  had  not  the  requisite  energy  for 
forming  a  clear  or  profound  judgment  on  any 
question  of  diflSculty;  Johnson's  comment,  "He 
thinks  justly  but  he  thinks  faintly,"  sums  up  the 
truth  about  him.  His  good  qualities  were  of  a 
slighter  kind  than  Swift's;  he  was  a  quiet  and 
accurate  observer  of  manners  and  fashions  in 
life  and  conversation,  and  he  had  the  gift  of  a 
style — ^what  Johnson  calls  "The  Middle  Style" 
— very  exactly  suited  to  the  kind  of  work  on  which 
he  was  habitually  engaged,  "always  equable, 
always  easy,  without  glowing  words  or  pointed 
sentences"  but  polished,  lucid,  and  urbane. 

Steele  and  Addison  were  conscious  moralists 
as  well  as  literary  men.  They  desired  to  purge 
society  from  Restoration  licences;  to  their  ef- 
forts we  must  credit  the  alteration  in  morality 
which  The  School  for  Scandal  shows  over  The 
Way  of  the  World.  Their  professed  object  as 
they  stated  themselves  was  "to  banish  vice  and 
ignorance  out  of  the  territories  of  Great  Britain," 
(nothing  less !)  "  and  to  bring  philosophy  out 
of  closets  and  libraries,  schools  and  colleges,  to 
dwell  in  clubs  and  assemblies,  at  tea-tables 
and  coffee-houses."  In  fact  their  satires  were 
politically  nearer  home,  and  the  chief  objects 
of  their  aversion  were  the  Tory  squires  whom 
it  was  their  business  as  Whigs  to  deride.  On 
the  Coverley  papers  in  the  Spectator  rests  the 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     137 

chief  part  of  their  literary  fame;  these  belong 
rather  to  the  special  history  of  the  novel  than 
to  that  of  the  periodical  essay. 


CHAPTER  VI 

DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME 

By  1730  the  authors  whose  work  made  the 
"classic"  school  in  England  were  dead  or  had 
ceased  writing;  by  the  same  date  Samuel  John- 
son had  begun  his  career  as  a  man  of  letters.  The 
difference  between  the  period  of  his  maturity 
and  the  period  we  have  been  examining  is  not 
perhaps  easy  to  define;  but  it  exists  and  it  can 
be  felt  unmistakably  in  reading.  For  one  thing 
"Classicism"  had  become  completely  naturalized; 
it  had  ceased  to  regard  the  French  as  arbiters 
of  elegance  and  literary  taste;  indeed  Johnson 
himself  never  spoke  of  them  without  disdain 
and  hated  them  as  much  as  he  hated  Scots- 
men. Writing,  like  dress  and  the  common  way 
of  Hfe,  became  plainer  and  graver  and  thought 
stronger  and  deeper.  In  manners  and  speech 
something  of  the  brutalism  which  was  at  the 
root  of  the  English  character  at  the  time  began 
to  colour  the  refinement  of  the  preceding  age. 
Dilettantism  gave  way  to  learning  and  specu- 
lation; in  the  place  of  Bolingbroke  came  Adam 
Smith;  in  the  place  of  Addison,  Johnson.  In 
a  way  it  is  the  solidest  and  sanest  time  in  English 
letters.     Yet  in  the  midst  of  its  urbanity  and 


138    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

order  forces  were  gathering  for  its  destruction. 
The  ballad-mongers  were  busy;  Blake  was  draw- 
ing and  rhyming;  Burns  was  giving  songs  and 
lays  to  his  country-side.  In  the  distance — John- 
son could  not  hear  them — sounded,  like  the  horns 
of  elf-land  faintly  blowing,  the  trumpet  calls  of 
romance. 

If  the  whole  story  of  Dr.  Johnson's  life  were 
the  story  of  his  published  books  it  would  be 
very  diflScult  to  understand  his  pre-eminent  and 
symbolic  position  in  literary  history.  His  best 
known  work — it  still  remains  so — was  his  dic- 
tionary, and  dictionaries,  for  all  the  licence  they 
give  and  Johnson  took  for  the  expression  of  a 
personality,  are  the  business  of  purely  mechan- 
ical talents.  A  lesser  man  than  he  might  have 
cheated  us  of  such  delights  as  the  definitions  of 
"oats,"  or  "net"  or  "pension,"  but  his  book 
would  certainly  have  been  no  worse  as  a  book. 
In  his  early  years  he  wrote  two  satires  in  verse 
in  imitation  of  Juvenal ;  they  were  followed 
later  by  two  series  of  periodical  essays  on  the 
model  of  the  Spectator;  neither  of  them — the 
Rambler  nor  the  Idler  —  was  at  all  successful. 
Rasselas,  a  tale  with  a  purpose,  is  melancholy 
reading ;  the  Journey  to  the  Western  Hebrides 
has  been  utterly  eclipsed  by  Boswell's  livelier 
and  more  human  chronicle  of  the  same  events. 
The  Lives  of  the  Poets,  his  greatest  work,  was 
composed  with  pain  and  difficulty  when  he 
was  seventy  years  old;  even  it  is  but  a  quarry 
from  which  a  reader  may  dig  the  ore  of  a  sound 
critical  judgment  summing  up  a  life's  reflection, 
out  of  the  grit  and  dust  of  perfunctory  biograph- 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND_^HIS  TIME     139 

ical  compilations.  There  was  hardly  one  of  the 
literary  coterie  over  which  he  presided  that  was 
not  doing  better  and  more  lasting  work.  Noth- 
ing that  Johnson  wrote  is  to  be  compared,  for 
excellence  in  its  own  manner,  with  Tom  Jones 
or  the  Vicar  of  Wakefield  or  the  Citizen  of  the 
World.  He  produced  nothing  in  writing  ap- 
proaching the  magnitude  of  Gibbon's  Decline 
and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,  or  the  profundity 
of  Burke's  philosophy  of  politics.  Even  Sir 
Joshua  Reynolds,  whose  main  business  was 
painting  and  not  the  pen,  was  almost  as  good 
an  author  as  he;  his  Discourses  have  little  to 
fear  when  they  are  set  beside  Johnson's  essays. 
Yet  all  these  men  recognised  him  as  their  guide 
and  leader;  the  spontaneous  selection  of  such 
a  democratic  assembly  as  men  of  genius  in  a 
tavern  fixed  upon  him  as  chairman,  and  we  in 
these  later  days,  who  are  safe  from  the  over- 
powering force  of  personality  and  presence — or 
at  least  can  only  know  of  it  reflected  in  books 
— instinctively  recognize  him  as  the  greatest  man 
of  his  age.    What  is  the  reason.^ 

Johnson's  pre-eminence  is  the  pre-eminence  of 
character.  He  was  a  great  moralist;  he  summed 
up  in  himself  the  tendencies  of  thought  and 
literature  of  his  time  and  excelled  all  others 
in  his  grasp  of  them ;  and  he  was  perhaps  more 
completely  than  any  one  else  in  the  whole  his- 
tory of  English  literature,  the  typical  Englishman. 
He  was  one  of  those  to  whom  is  applicable  the 
commonplace  that  he  was  greater  than  his  books. 
It  is  the  fashion  nowadays  among  some  critics 
to  speak  of  his  biographer  Boswell  as  if  he  were 


140    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

a  novelist  or  a  playwright  and  to  classify  the 
Johnson  we  know  with  Hamlet  and  Don  Quixote 
as  the  product  of  creative  or  imaginative  art, 
working  on  a  "lost  original."  No  exercise  of 
critical  ingenuity  could  be  more  futile  or  imper- 
tinent. The  impression  of  the  solidity  and  magni- 
tude of  Johnson's  character  which  is  to  be  gathered 
from  Boswell  is  enforced  from  other  sources;  from 
his  essays  and  his  prayers  and  meditations,  from 
the  half-dozen  or  so  lives  and  reminiscences  which 
were  published  in  the  years  following  his  death 
(their  very  number  establishing  the  reverence 
with  which  he  was  regarded),  from  the  homage 
of  other  men  whose  genius  their  books  leave 
indisputable.  Indeed  the  Johnson  we  know  from 
Boswell,  though  it  is  the  broadest  and  most 
masterly  portrait  in  the  whole  range  of  biography, 
gives  less  than  the  whole  magnitude  of  the  man. 
When  Boswell  first  met  him  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
two,  Johnson  was  fifty-four.  His  long  period  of 
poverty  and  struggle  was  past.  His  Dictonary 
and  all  his  works  except  the  Lives  oj  the  Poets 
were  behind  him;  a  pension  from  the  Crown  had 
established  him  in  security  for  his  remaining 
years;  his  position  was  universally  acknowledged. 
So  that  though  the  portrait  in  the  Life  is  a  full- 
length  study  of  Johnson  the  conversationalist 
and  literary  dictator,  the  proportion  it  preserves 
is  faulty  and  its  study  of  the  early  years — the 
years  of  poverty,  of  the  Vanity  of  Human  Wishes 
and  London,  of  Rasselas,  which  he  wrote  to  pay 
the  expenses  of  his  mother's  funeral,  is  slight. 

It  was,  however,  out  of  the  bitterness  and 
struggle  of  these  early  years  that  the  strength 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     141 

and  sincerity  of  character  which  carried  Johnson 
surely  and  tranquilly  through  the  time  of  his 
triumph  were  derived.  From  the  beginning  he 
made  no  compromise  with  the  worid  and  no  con- 
cession to  fashion.  The  worid  had  to  take  him 
at  his  own  valuation  or  not  at  all.  He  never 
deviated  one  hair's  breadth  from  the  way  he 
had  chosen.  Judged  by  the  standards  of  jour- 
nalistic success,  the  Rambler  could  not  well  be 
worse  than  he  made  it.  Compared  with  the 
lightness  and  gaiety  and  the  mere  lip-service 
to  morality  of  Addison  its  edification  is  ponder- 
ous. Both  authors  state  the  commonplaces  of 
conduct,  but  Addison  achieves  lightness  in  the 
doing  of  it,  and  his  manner  by  means  of  which 
platitudes  are  stated  lightly  and  pointedly  and 
with  an  air  of  novelty,  is  the  classic  manner  of 
journalism.  Johnson  goes  heavily  and  directly 
to  the  point,  handhng  well  worn  moral  themes 
in  general  and  dogmatic  language  without  any 
attempt  to  enliven  them  with  an  air  of  discovery 
or  surprise.  Yet  they  were,  in  a  sense,  discoveries 
to  him;  not  one  of  them  but  was  deeply  and  sin- 
cerely felt;  not  one  but  is  not  a  direct  and  to  us 
a  pathetically  dispassionate  statement  of  the 
reflection  of  thirty  years  of  grinding  poverty  and 
a  soul's  anguish.  Viewed  in  the  light  of  his 
life,  the  Rambler  is  one  of  the  most  moving  of 
books.  If  its  literary  value  is  slight  it  is  a  docu- 
ment in  character. 

So  that  when  he  came  to  his  own,  when  grad- 
ually the  public  whom  he  despised  and  neglected 
raised  him  into  a  pontifical  position  matched 
by  none  before  him  in  England  and  none  since 


142    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

save  Carlyle,  he  was  sure  of  himself;  success 
did  not  spoil  him.  His  judgment  was  un warped 
by  flattery.  The  almost  passionate  tenderness 
and  humanity  which  lay  beneath  his  gruffness 
was  undimmed.  His  personality  triumphed  in 
all  the  fullness  and  richness  which  had  carried 
it  in  integrity  through  his  years  of  struggle.  For 
over  twenty  years  from  his  chair  in  taverns  in 
the  Strand  and  Fleet  Street  he  ruled  literary 
London,  imposed  his  critical  principles  on  the 
great  body  of  English  letters,  and  by  his  talk  and 
his  friendships  became  the  embodiment  of  the 
literary  temperament  of  his  age. 

His  talk  as  it  is  set  down  by  Boswell  is  his 
best  monument.  It  was  the  happiest  possible 
fate  that  threw  those  two  men  together,  for  Bos- 
well besides  being  an  admirer  and  reporter  sedu- 
lously chronicling  all  his  master  said  and  did, 
fortunately  influenced  both  the  saying  and  the 
doing.  Most  of  us  have  some  one  in  whose  com- 
pany we  best  shine,  who  puts  our  wits  on  their 
mettle  and  spurs  us  to  our  greatest  readiness  and 
vivacity.  There  is  no  doubt  that  Boswell,  for 
all  his  assumed  humility  and  for  all  Johnson's 
affected  disdain,  was  just  such  a  companion  for 
Johnson.  Johnson  was  at  his  best  when  Boswell 
was  present,  and  Boswell  not  only  drew  Johnson 
out  on  subjects  in  which  his  robust  common 
sense  and  readiness  of  judgment  were  fitted  to 
shine  but  actually  suggested  and  conducted  that 
tour  in  Scotland  which  gave  Johnson  an  oppor- 
tunity for  displaying  himself  at  his  best.  The 
recorded  talk  is  extraordinarily  varied  and  enter- 
taining.    It  is  a  mistake  to  conceive  Johnson  as 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     143 

a  monster  of  bear-like  rudeness,  shouting  down 
opposition,  hectoring  his  companions,  and  habit- 
ually a  blustering  verbal  bully.  We  are  too  easily 
hypnotized  by  Macaulay's  flashy  caricature.  He 
could  be  merciless  in  argument  and  often  wrong- 
headed  and  he  was  always  acute,  uncomfortably 
acute,  in  his  perception  of  a  fallacy,  and  a  little 
disconcerting  in  his  unmasking  of  pretence.  But 
he  could  be  gay  and  tender  too  and  in  his  heart 
he  was  a  shrinking  and  sensitive  man. 

As  a  critic  (his  criticism  is  the  only  side  of  his 
literary  work  that  need  be  considered),  Johnson 
must  be  allowed  a  high  place.  His  natural  in- 
dolence in  production  had  prevented  him  from 
exhausting  his  faculties  in  the  more  exacting 
labours  of  creative  work,  and  it  had  left  him 
time  for  omnivorous  if  desultory  reading,  the 
fruits  of  which  he  stored  in  a  wonderfully  reten- 
tive memory  against  an  occasion  for  their  use. 
To  a  very  fully  equipped  mind  he  brought  the 
service  of  a  robust  and  acute  judgment.  More- 
over when  he  applied  his  mind  to  a  subject  he 
had  a  faculty  of  intense,  if  fitful  concentration; 
he  could  seize  with  great  force  on  the  heart  of  a 
matter;  he  had  the  power  in  a  wonderfully  short 
time  of  extracting  the  kernel  and  leaving  the 
husk.  His  judgments  in  writing  are  like  those 
recorded  by  Boswell  from  his  conversation; 
that  is  to  say  he  does  not,  as  a  critic  whose 
medium  was  normally  the  pen  rather  than  the 
tongue  would  tend  to  do,  search  for  fine  shades 
of  distinction,  subdivide  subtleties,  or  be  careful 
to  admit  caveats  or  exceptions;  he  passes,  on  the 
contrary,  rapid  and  forcible   verdicts,  not   sel- 


144    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

dom  in  their  assertions  untenably  sweeping,  and 
always  decided  and  dogmatic.  He  never  affects 
diflfidence  or  defers  to  the  judgments  of  others. 
His  power  of  concentration,  of  seizing  on  essen- 
tials, has  given  us  his  best  critical  work — nothing 
could  be  better,  for  instance,  than  his  char- 
acterisation of  the  poets  whom  he  calls  the 
metaphysical  school  (Donne,  Crashaw,  and  the 
rest)  which  is  the  most  valuable  part  of  his 
life  of  Cowley.  Even  where  he  is  most  preju- 
diced— for  instance  in  his  attack  on  Milton's 
Lycidas — there  is  usually  something  to  be  said 
for  his  point  of  view.  And  after  this  concentra- 
tion, his  excellence  depends  on  his  basic  common 
sense.  His  classicism  is  always  tempered,  like 
Diyden's,  by  a  humane  and  sensible  dislike 
of  pedantry;  he  sets  no  store  by  the  unities; 
in  his  preface  to  Shakespeare  he  allows  more 
than  a  "classic"  could  have  been  expected  to 
admit,  writing  in  it,  in  truth,  some  of  the  manliest 
and  wisest  things  in  Shakespearean  literature. 
Of  course,  he  had  his  failings — the  greatest  of 
them  what  Lamb  called  imperfect  sympathy.  He 
could  see  no  good  in  republicans  or  agnostics, 
and  none  in  Scotland  or  France.  Not  that  the 
phrase  "imperfect  sympathy,"  which  expresses 
by  implication  the  romantic  critic's  point  of  view, 
would  have  appealed  to  him.  When  Dr.  Johnson 
did  not  like  people  the  fault  was  in  them,  not  in 
him;  a  ruthless  objectivity  is  part  of  the  classic 
equipment.  He  failed,  too,  because  he  could 
neither  understand  nor  appreciate  poetry  which 
concerned  itself  with  the  sensations  that  come 
from   external  nature.     Nature  was  to   him  a 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     145 

closed  book,  very  likely  for  a  purely  physical 
reason.  He  was  short-sighted  to  the  point  of 
myopia,  and  a  landscape  meant  nothing  to  him; 
when  he  tried  to  describe  one  as  he  did  in  the 
chapter  on  the  "happy  valley"  in  Rasselas  he 
failed.  What  he  did  not  see  he  could  not  appre- 
ciate; perhaps  it  is  too  much  to  ask  of  his  self- 
contained  and  unbending  intellect  that  he  should 
appreciate  the  report  of  it  by  other  men. 


(2) 

As  we  have  seen,  Johnson  was  not  only  great 
in  himself,  he  was  great  in  his  friends.  Round 
him,  meeting  him  as  an  equal,  gathered  the 
greatest  and  most  prolific  writers  of  the  time. 
There  is  no  better  way  to  study  the  central  and 
accepted  men  of  letters  of  the  period  than  to  take 
some  full  evening  at  the  club  from  Boswell,  read 
a  page  or  two,  watch  what  the  talkers  said,  and 
then  trace  each  back  to  his  own  works  for  a 
complete  picture  of  his  personality.  The  lie 
of  the  literary  landscape  in  this  wonderful  time 
will  become  apparent  to  you  as  you  read.  You 
will  find  Johnson  enthroned,  Boswell  at  his  ear, 
round  him  men  like  Reynolds  and  Burke,  Rich- 
ardson and  Fielding  and  Goldsmith,  Robertson 
and  Gibbon,  and  occasionally  drawn  to  the 
circle  minnows  like  Beattie  and  a  genius  like 
Adam  Smith.  Gray,  studious  in  his  college  at 
Cambridge,  is  exercising  his  fastidious  talent; 
Collins'  sequestered,  carefully  nurtured  muse  is 
silent;  a  host  of  minor  poets  are  riding  Pope's 


146    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

poetic  diction  and  heroic  couplet  to  death. 
Outside  scattered  about  is  the  van  of  Romance 
— Percy  collecting  his  ballads;  Burns  making 
songs  and  verses  in  Scotland;  the  "mad"  people. 
Smart  and  Chatterton,  and  above  all  Blake, 
obscurely  beginning  the  work  that  was  to  fin- 
ish in  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  and  Keats. 

Of  Johnson's  set  the  most  remarkable  figure 
was  Edmund  Burke — "the  supreme  writer,"  as 
De  Quincey  called  him,  "of  his  century."  His 
writings  belong  more  to  the  history  of  politics 
than  to  that  of  literature,  and  a  close  examina- 
tion of  them  would  be  out  of  place  here.  His 
political  theory  strikes  a  middle  course  which 
offends — and  in  his  own  day  offended — both  par- 
ties in  the  common  strife  of  political  thinking. 
He  believed  the  best  government  to  consist  in  a 
patriotic  aristocracy,  ruling  for  the  good  of  the 
people.  By  birth  an  Irishman,  he  had  the  innate 
practicality  which  commonly  lies  beneath  the 
flash  and  colour  of  Irish  forcefulness  and  rhetoric. 
That,  and  his  historical  training,  which  influenced 
him  in  the  direction  of  conceiving  every  institu- 
tion as  the  culmination  of  an  evolutionary  devel- 
opment, sent  him  directly  counter  to  the  newest 
and  most  enthusiastically  urged  political  phi- 
losophy of  his  day — the  philosophy  stated  by 
Rousseau,  and  put  in  action  by  the  French  Revo- 
lution. He  disliked  and  distrusted  "metaphysical 
theories,"  when  they  left  the  field  of  speculation 
for  that  of  practice,  had  no  patience  with  "  natural 
rights"  (which  as  an  Irishman  he  conceived  as 
the  product  of  sentimentalism)  and  applied  what 
would  nowadays  be  called  a  "pragmatic"  test  to 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     147 

political  affairs.  Practice  was  the  touchstone; 
a  theory  was  useless  unless  you  could  prove  that 
it  had  worked.  It  followed  that  he  was  not  a 
democrat,  opposed  parliamentary  reform,  and 
held  that  the  true  remedy  for  corruption  and 
venaUty  was  not  to  increase  the  size  of  the  elec- 
torate, but  to  reduce  it  so  to  obtain  electors  of 
greater  weight  and  independence.  For  him  a 
member  of  Parliament  was  a  representative  and 
not  a  delegate,  and  must  act  not  on  his  elector's 
wishes  but  on  his  own  judgment.  These  opinions 
are  little  in  fashion  in  our  own  day,  but  it  is  well 
to  remember  that  in  Burke's  case  they  were 
the  outcome  not  of  prejudice  but  of  thought,  and 
that  even  democracy  may  admit  they  present  a 
case  that  must  be  met  and  answered. 

Burke's  reputation  as  a  thinker  has  suffered 
somewhat  unjustly  as  a  result  of  his  refusal  to 
square  his  tenets  either  with  democracy  or  with 
its  opposite.  It  has  been  said  that  ideas  were 
only  of  use  to  him  so  far  as  they  were  of  polemical 
service,  that  the  amazing  fertility  and  acuteness 
of  his  mind  worked  only  in  a  not  too  scrupulous 
determination  to  overwhelm  his  antagonists  in 
the  several  arguments — on  India,  or  America, 
on  Ireland  or  on  France — ^which  made  up  his 
political  career.  He  was,  said  Carlyle,  "vehe- 
ment rather  than  earnest;  a  resplendent  far- 
sighted  rhetorician,  rather  than  a  deep  and  earnest 
thinker."  The  words  as  they  stand  would  be 
a  good  description  of  a  certain  type  of  poli- 
tician; they  would  fit,  for  instance,  very  well 
on  Mr.  Gladstone;  but  they  do  Burke  less 
than  justice.     He  was  an  innovator  in  modern 


148    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

political  thought,  and  his  application  of  the 
historical  method  to  the  study  of  institutions  is 
in  its  way  a  not  less  epoch-making  achievement 
than  Bacon's  application  of  the  inductive  method 
to  science.  At  a  time  when  current  political 
thought,  led  by  Rousseau,  was  drawing  its  the- 
ories from  the  abstract  conception  of  "natural 
rights"  Burke  was  laying  down  that  sounder  and 
deeper  notion  of  politics  which  has  governed 
thinking  in  that  department  of  knowledge  since. 
Besides  this,  he  had  face  to  face  with  the  affairs 
of  his  own  day,  a  far-sightedness  and  sagacity 
which  kept  him  right  where  other  men  went 
wrong.  In  a  nation  of  the  blind  he  saw  the  truth 
about  the  American  colonies;  he  predicted  with 
exactitude  the  culmination  of  the  revolution  in 
Napoleon.  Mere  rhetorical  vehemence  cannot 
explain  the  earnestness  with  which  in  a  day  of 
diplomatic  cynicism  he  preached  the  doctrine 
of  an  international  morality  as  strict  and  as 
binding  as  the  morality  which  exists  between 
man  and  man.  Surest  of  all,  we  have  the  testi- 
mony, uninfluenced  by  the  magic  of  language, 
of  the  men  he  met.  You  could  not,  said  Dr. 
Johnson,  shelter  with  him  in  a  shed  for  a  few 
moments  from  the  rain  without  saying,  "This  is 
an  extraordinary  man." 

His  Uterary  position  depends  chiefly  on  his 
amazing  gift  of  expression,  on  a  command  of 
language  unapproached  by  any  writer  of  his 
time.  His  eloquence  (in  writing  not  in  speaking; 
he  is  said  to  have  had  a  monotonous  delivery) 
was  no  doubt  at  bottom  a  matter  of  race,  but 
to  his  Irish  readiness  and  flash  and  colour  he 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     149 

added  the  strength  of  a  full  mind,  fortified  by  a 
wonderful  store  of  reading  which  a  retentive  and 
exact  memory  enabled  hira  to  bring  instantly  to 
bear  on  the  subject  in  hand.  No  writer  before 
him,  except  Defoe,  had  such  a  wide  knowledge 
of  the  technicalities  of  different  men's  occupa- 
tions, and  of  all  sorts  of  the  processes  of  daily 
business,  nor  could  enlighten  an  abstract  matter 
with  such  a  wealth  of  luminous  analogy.  It  is 
this  characteristic  of  his  style  which  has  led 
to  the  common  comparison  of  his  writing  with 
Shakespeare's;  both  seem  to  be  preternaturally 
endowed  with  more  information,  to  have  a  wider 
sweep  of  interest  than  ordinary  men.  Both  were 
not  only,  as  Matthew  Arnold  said  of  Burke, 
"saturated  with  ideas,"  but  saturated  too  in  the 
details  of  the  business  and  desire  of  ordinary 
men's  lives;  nothing  human  was  alien  from  them. 
Burke's  language  is,  therefore,  always  interesting 
and  always  appropriate  to  his  thought;  it  is  also 
on  occasion  very  beautiful.  He  had  a  wonderful 
command  of  clear  and  ringing  utterance  and 
could  appeal  when  he  liked  very  powerfully  to 
the  sensibilities  of  his  readers.  Rhetoricians  are 
seldom  free  from  occasional  extravagance,  and 
Burke  fell  under  the  common  danger  of  his 
kind.  He  had  his  moments  of  falsity,  could 
heap  coarse  and  outrageous  abuse  on  Warren 
Hastings,  illustrate  the  horrors  of  the  Revolution 
by  casting  a  dagger  on  the  floor  of  the  House  of 
Commons,  and  nourish  hatred  beyond  the  bounds 
of  justice  or  measure.  But  these  things  do  not 
affect  his  position,  nor  take  from  the  solid  great- 
ness of  his  work. 


150    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

Boswell  we  have  seen ;  after  Burke  and  Boswell, 
Goldsmith  was  the  most  brilliant  member  of 
the  Johnson  circle.  If  part  of  Burke's  genius 
is  referable  to  his  nationality,  Goldsmith's  is 
wholly  so.  The  beginning  and  the  end  of  him 
was  Irish;  every  quality  he  possessed  as  a  man 
and  as  a  writer  belongs  to  his  race.  He  had  the 
Irish  carelessness,  the  Irish  generosity,  the  Irish 
quick  temper,  the  Irish  humour.  This  latter 
gift,  displayed  constantly  in  a  company  which 
had  little  knowledge  of  the  peculiar  quality  of 
Irish  wit  and  no  faculty  of  sympathy  or  imagina- 
tion, is  at  the  bottom  of  the  constant  depreciation 
of  him  on  the  part  of  Boswell  and  others  of 
his  set.  His  mock  self-importance  they  thought 
ill-breeding;  his  humorous  self -depreciation  and 
keen  sense  of  his  own  ridiculousness,  mere  lack 
of  dignity  and  folly.  It  is  curious  to  read  Bos- 
well and  watch  how  often  Goldsmith,  without 
Boswell's  knowing  it,  got  the  best  of  the  joke. 
In  writing  he  had  what  we  can  now  recognise 
as  peculiarly  Irish  gifts.  All  our  modern  writers 
of  light  half-farcical  comedy  are  Irish.  Gold- 
smith's She  Stoops  to  Conquer,  is  only  the  first 
of  a  series  which  includes  The  School  for  Scandal, 
The  Importance  of  being  Earnest,  and  You  Never 
can  Tell.  And  his  essays — particularly  those  of 
the  Citizen  of  the  World  with  its  Chinese  vision 
of  England  and  English  life — are  the  first  fruit 
of  that  Irish  detachment,  that  ability  to  see 
"normally"  English  habits  and  institutions  and 
foibles  which  in  our  own  day  has  given  us  the 
prefaces  of  Mr.  Shaw.  As  a  writer  Goldsmith 
has  a  lightness  and  delicate  ease  which  belongs 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     151 

rather  to  the  school  of  the  earHer  eighteenth 
century  than  to  his  own  day;  the  enthusiasm 
of  Addison  for  French  literature  which  he  re- 
tained gave  him  a  more  graceful  model  than  the 
"Johnsonian"  school,  to  which  he  professed 
himself  to  belong,  could  afford. 


(3) 

The  eighteenth  century  novel  demands  sepa- 
rate treatment,  and  of  the  other  prose  authors 
the  most  eminent,  Edward  Gibbon,  belongs  to 
historical  rather  than  to  literary  studies.  It  is 
time  to  turn  to  poetry. 

There  orthodox  classicism  still  held  sway;  the 
manner  and  metre  of  Pope  or  Thomson  ruled  the 
roost  of  singing  fowl.  In  the  main  it  had  done 
its  work,  and  the  bulk  of  fresh  things  conceived 
in  it  were  dull  and  imitative,  even  though  occa- 
sionally, as  in  the  poems  of  Johnson  himself  and 
of  Goldsmith,  an  author  arose  who  was  able  to 
infuse  sincerity  and  emotion  into  a  now  moribund 
convention.  The  classic  manner — now  more  that 
of  Thomson  than  of  Pope — persisted  till  it  over- 
lapped romanticism;  Cowper  and  Crabbe  each 
owe  a  doubtful  allegiance,  leaning  by  their 
formal  metre  and  level  monotony  of  thought  to 
the  one  and  by  their  realism  to  the  other.  In 
the  meantime  its  popularity  and  its  assured 
position  were  beginning  to  be  assailed  in  the 
coteries  by  the  work  of  two  new  poets. 

The  output  of  Thomas  Gray  and  William 
Collins   is   small;   you   might   almost   read   the 


152    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

complete  poetical  works  of  either  in  an  evening. 
But  for  all  that  they  mark  a  period;  they  are 
the  first  definite  break  with  the  classic  conven- 
tion which  had  been  triumphant  for  upwards  of 
seventy  years  when  their  prime  came.  It  is  a 
break,  however,  in  style  rather  than  in  essentials, 
and  a  reader  who  seeks  in  them  the  inspiriting 
freshness  which  came  later  with  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge  will  be  disappointed.  Their  carefully 
drawn  still  wine  tastes  insipidly  after  the  "beaded 
bubbles  winking  at  the  brim"  of  romance.  They 
are  fastidious  and  academic;  they  lack  the  au- 
thentic fire;  their  poetry  is  "made"  poetry  like 
Tennyson's  and  Matthew  Arnold's.  On  their 
comparative  merits  a  deal  of  critical  ink  has  been 
spilt.  Arnold's  characterisation  of  Gray  is  well 
known — "he  never  spoke  out."  Sterility  fell 
upon  him  because  he  lived  in  an  age  of  prose 
just  as  it  fell  upon  Arnold  himself  because  he 
lived  too  much  immersed  in  business  and  rou- 
tine. But  in  what  he  wrote  he  had  the  gen- 
uine poetic  gift — the  gift  of  insight  and  feeling. 
Against  this,  Swinburne  with  characteristic  vehe- 
mence raised  the  standard  of  Collins,  the  latchet 
of  whose  shoe  Gray,  as  a  lyric  poet,  was  not 
worthy  to  unloose.  "The  muse  gave  birth  to 
Collins,  she  did  but  give  suck  to  Gray."  It  is 
more  to  our  point  to  observe  that  neither,  though 
their  work  abounds  in  felicities  and  in  touches 
of  a  genuine  poetic  sense,  was  fitted  to  raise  the 
standard  of  revolt.  Revolution  is  for  another  and 
braver  kind  of  genius  than  theirs.  Romanticism 
had  to  wait  for  Burns  and  Blake. 
In  every  country  at  any  one  time  there  are 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     153 

in  all  probability  not  one  but  several  literatures 
flourishing.  The  main  stream  flowing  through 
the  publishers  and  booksellers,  conned  by  critics 
and  coteries,  recognized  as  the  national  litera- 
ture, is  commonly  only  the  largest  of  several 
channels  of  thought.  There  are  besides  the 
national  literature  local  literatures — ^books,  that 
is,  are  published  which  enjoy  popularity  and  crit- 
ical esteem  in  their  own  county  or  parish  and  are 
utterly  unknown  outside;  there  may  even  be 
(indeed,  there  are  in  several  parts  of  the  country) 
distinct  local  schools  of  writing  and  dynasties  of 
local  authors.  These  localized  literatures  rarely 
become  known  to  the  outside  world;  the  national 
literature  takes  little  account  of  them,  though 
their  existence  and  probably  some  special  knowl- 
edge of  one  or  other  of  them  is  within  the  expe- 
rience of  most  of  us.  But  every  now  and  again 
some  one  of  their  authors  transcends  his  local 
importance,  gives  evidence  of  a  genius  which  is 
not  to  be  denied  even  by  those  who  normally 
have  not  the  knowledge  to  appreciate  the  par- 
ticular flavour  of  locality  which  his  writings 
impart,  and  becomes  a  national  figure.  While 
he  lives  and  works  the  national  and  his  local 
stream  turn  and  flow  together. 

This  was  the  case  of  Robert  Bums.  All  his 
life  long  he  was  the  singer  of  a  parish — the  last 
of  a  long  line  of  "forbears"  who  had  used  the 
Scottish  lowland  vernacular  to  rhyme  in  about 
their  neighbours  and  their  scandals,  their  loves 
and  their  church.  Himself  at  the  confluence  of 
the  two  streams,  the  national  and  the  local,  he 
pays  his  tribute  to  two  sets  of  originals,  talks 


154    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

with  equal  reverence  of  names  known  to  us 
like  Pope  and  Gray  and  Shenstone  and  names 
unknown  which  belonged  to  local  "bards,"  as 
he  would  have  called  them,  who  wrote  their 
poems  for  an  Ayrshire  public.  If  he  came  upon 
England  as  an  innovator  it  was  simply  because 
he  brought  with  him  the  highly  individualized 
style  of  Scottish  local  vernacular  verse;  to  his  own 
people  he  was  no  innovator  but  a  fulfilment; 
as  his  best  critic  ^  says  he .  brought  nothing  to 
the  literature  he  became  a  part  of  but  himself. 
His  daring  and  splendid  genius  made  the  local 
universal,  raised  out  of  rough  and  cynical  satir- 
izing a  style  as  rich  and  humorous  and  astrin- 
gent as  that  of  Rabelais,  lent  inevitableness  and 
pathoi?  and  romance  to  lyric  and  song.  But  he 
was  content  to  better  the  work  of  other  men. 
He  made  hardly  anything  new. 

Stevenson  in  his  essay  on  Burns  remarks 
his  readiness  to  use  up  the  work  of  others  or 
take  a  large  hint  from  it  "as  if  he  had  some 
dijBBculty  in  commencing."  He  omits  to  observe 
that  the  very  same  trait  applies  to  other  great 
artists.  There  seem  to  be  two  orders  of  creative 
writers.  On  the  one  hand  are  the  innovators, 
the  new  men  like  Blake,  Wordsworth,  Byron  and 
Shelley,  and  later  Browning.  These  men  owe 
little  to  their  predecessors;  they  work  on  their 
own  devices  and  construct  their  medium  afresh 
for  themselves.  Commonly  their  fame  and 
acceptance  is  slow,  for  they  speak  in  an  unfamil- 
iar tongue  and  they  have  to  educate  a  genera- 
tion to  understand  their  work.     The  other  order 

1  W.  E.  Henley,  "Essay  on  Burns."    Works,  David  Nutt. 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME     155 

of  artists  have  to  be  shown  the  way.  They 
have  little  fertility  in  construction  or  invention. 
You  have  to  say  to  them  "Here  is  something 
that  you  could  do  too;  go  and  do  it  better,"  or 
"Here  is  a  story  to  work  on,  or  a  refrain  of  a 
song;  take  it  and  give  it  your  subtlety,  your 
music."  The  villainy  you  teach  them  they  will 
use  and  it  will  go  hard  with  them  if  they  do  not 
better  the  invention;  but  they  do  not  invent  for 
themselves.  To  this  order  of  artists  Burns  like 
Shakespeare,  and  among  the  lesser  men  Tenny- 
son, belongs.  In  all  his  plays  Shakespeare  is 
known  to  have  invented  only  one  plot;  in  many 
he  is  using  not  only  the  structure  but  in  many 
places  the  words  devised  by  an  older  author;  his 
mode  of  treatment  depends  on  the  conventions 
common  in  his  day,  on  the  tragedy  of  blood,  and 
madness  and  revenge,  on  the  comedy  of  intrigue 
and  disguises,  on  the  romance  with  its  strange 
happenings  and  its  reuniting  of  long  parted 
friends.  Burns  goes  the  same  way  to  work; 
scarcely  a  page  of  his  but  shows  traces  of  some 
original  in  the  Scottish  vernacular  school.  The 
elegy,  the  verse  epistle,  the  satirical  form  of 
Holy  Willie's  Prayer,  the  song  and  recitative  of 
The  Jolly  Beggars,  are  all  to  be  found  in  his  prede- 
cessors, in  Fergusson,  Ramsay,  and  the  local 
poets  of  the  south-west  of  Scotland.  In  the  songs 
often  whole  verses,  nearly  always  the  refrains, 
are  from  older  folk  poetry.  What  he  did  was  to 
pour  into  these  forms  the  imcomparable  richness 
of  a  personality  whose  fire  and  brilliance  and 
humour  transcended  all  locality  and  all  tradition, 
a  personality  which  strode  like  a  colossus  over 


156    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

the  formalism  and  correctness  of  his  time.  His 
use  of  familiar  forms  explains,  more  than  any- 
thing else,  his  immediate  fame.  His  countrymen 
were  ready  for  him;  they  could  hail  him  on  the 
instant  (just  as  an  Elizabethan  audience  could 
hail  Shakespeare)  as  something  familiar  and  at 
the  same  time  more  splendid  than  anything  they 
knew.  He  spoke  in  a  tongue  they  could  under- 
stand. 

It  is  impossible  to  judge  Burns  from  his  purely 
English  verse;  though  he  did  it  as  well  as  any 
of  the  minor  followers  of  the  school  of  Pope  he  did 
it  no  better.  Only  the  weakest  side  of  his  character 
— his  sentimentalism — finds  expression  in  it;  he 
had  not  the  sense  of  tradition  nor  the  intimate 
knowledge  necessary  to  use  English  to  the  highest 
poetic  effect;  it  was  indeed  a  foreign  tongue 
to  him.  In  the  vernacular  he  wrote  the  language 
he  spoke,  a  language  whose  natural  force  and 
colour  had  become  enriched  by  three  centuries 
of  literary  use,  which  was  capable,  too,  of  effects 
of  humour  and  realism  impossible  in  any  tongue 
spoken  out  of  reach  of  the  soil.  It  held  within 
it  an  unmatched  faculty  for  pathos,  a  capacity 
for  expressing  a  lambent  and  kindly  humour, 
a  power  of  pungency  in  satire  and  a  descriptive 
vividness  that  English  could  not  give.  How  ex- 
press in  the  language  of  Pope  or  even  of  Words- 
worth an  effect  like  this: — 

"They  reeled,  they  set,  they  cross'd,  they  cleekit. 
Till  ilka  carlin  swat  and  reekit. 
And  coost  her  duddies  to  the  wark. 
And  linket  at  it  in  her  sark." 

or  this: — 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME    157 

"Yestreen  when  to  the  trembling  string. 
The  dance  gaed  thro'  the  lighteid  ha' 
To  thee  my  fancy  took  its  wing — 
I  sat  but  neither  heard  nor  saw: 
Tho'  this  was  fair,  and  that  was  braw. 
And  yon  the  toast  of  a'  the  toun, 
I  sigh'd  and  said  amang  them  a'. 
You  are  na  Mary  Morison." 

It  may  be  objected  that  in  all  this  there  is  only 
one  word,  and  but  two  or  three  forms  of  words 
that  are  not  English.  But  the  accent,  the  rhythm, 
the  air  of  it  are  all  Scots,  and  it  was  a  Burns 
thinking  in  his  native  tongue  who  wrote  it,  not 
the  Burns  of 

"Anticipation  forward  points  the  view"; 

or 

"Pleasures  are  like  poppies  spread. 
You  grasp  the  flower,  the  bloom  is  shed." 

or  any  other  of  the  exercises  in  the  school  of 
Thomson  and  Pope. 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  though  Burns  admired 
unaffectedly  the  "classic"  writers,  his  native 
realism  and  his  melody  made  him  a  potent  agent 
in  the  cause  of  naturalism  and  romance.  In  his 
ideas,  even  more  than  in  his  style,  he  belongs  to 
the  oncoming  school.  The  French  Revolution, 
which  broke  upon  Europe  when  he  was  at  the 
height  of  his  career,  found  him  already  converted 
to  its  principles.  As  a  peasant,  particularly  a 
Scotch  peasant,  he  believed  passionately  in  the 
native  worth  of  man  as  man  and  gave  ringing 
expression  to  it  in  his  verse.  In  his  youth  his 
liberal-mindedness  made  him  a  Jacobite  out  of 
mere  antagonism  to  the  existing  regime;  the 
Revolution  only  discovered  for  him   the   more 


158    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

logical  Republican  creed.  As  the  leader  of  a 
loose-living,  hard  drinking  set,  such  as  was  to  be 
found  in  every  parish,  he  was  a  determined  and 
free-spoken  enemy  of  the  kirk,  whose  tyranny 
he  several  times  encountered.  In  his  writing  he 
is  as  vehement  an  anti-clerical  as  Shelley  and 
much  more  practical.  The  political  side  of  roman- 
ticism, in  fact,  which  in  England  had  to  wait 
for  Byron  and  Shelley,  is  already  full-grown  in 
his  work.  He  anticipates  and  gives  complete  ex- 
pression to  one  half  of  the  Romantic  movement. 
What  Burns  did  for  the  idea  of  liberty,  Blake 
did  for  that  and  every  other  idea  current  among 
Wordsworth  and  his  successors.  There  is  nothing 
stranger  in  the  history  of  English  literature  than 
the  miracle  by  which  this  poet  and  artist,  work- 
ing in  obscurity,  utterly  unknown  to  the  literary 
world  that  existed  outside  him,  summed  up  in 
himself  all  the  thoughts  and  tendencies  which 
were  the  fruit  of  anxious  discussion  and  propa- 
ganda on  the  part  of  the  authors — Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  Lamb — who  believed  themselves  to 
be  the  discoverers  of  fresh  truth  unknown  to 
their  generation.  The  contemporary  and  inde- 
pendent discovery  by  Wallace  and  Darwin  of 
the  principle  of  natural  selection  furnishes,  per- 
haps, a  rough  parallel,  but  the  fact  serves  to 
show  how  impalpable  and  universal  is  the  spread 
of  ideas,  how  impossible  it  is  to  settle  literary 
indebtedness  or  construct  literary  genealogy 
with  any  hope  of  accuracy.  Blake,  by  himself, 
held  and  expressed  quite  calmly  that  condem- 
nation of  the  "classic"  school  that  Wordsworth 
and  Coleridge  proclaimed  against  the  opposition 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME    159 

of  a  deriding  world.     As  was  his  habit  he  com- 
pressed it  into  a  rude  epigram, 

"Great  things  are  done  when  men  and  mountains  meet; 
This  is  not  done  by  jostling  in  the  street. " 

The  case  for  nature  against  urbanity  could 
not  be  more  tersely  nor  better  put.  The  German 
metaphysical  doctrine  which  was  the  deepest 
part  of  the  teaching  of  Wordsworth  and  Cole- 
ridge and  their  main  discovery,  he  expresses 
as  curtly  and  off-handedly, 

"The  sun's  light  when  he  unfolds  it. 
Depends  on  the  organ  that  beholds  it." 

In  the  realm  of  childhood  and  innocence,  which 
Wordsworth  entered  fearfully  and  pathetically 
as  an  alien  traveller,  he  moves  with  the  simple 
and  assured  ease  of  one  native.  He  knows  the 
mystical  wonder  and  horror  that  Coleridge  set 
forth  in  The  Ancient  Mariner.  As  for  the  beliefs 
of  Shelley,  they  are  already  fully  developed  in 
his  poems.  "The  king  and  the  priest  are  types 
of  the  oppressor;  humanity  is  crippled  by  'mind- 
forg'd  manacles';  love  is  enslaved  to  the  moral 
law,  which  is  broken  by  the  Saviour  of  man- 
kind; and,  even  more  subtly  than  by  Shelley, 
life  is  pictured  by  Blake  as  a  deceit  and  a  dis- 
guise veiling  from  us  the  beams  of  the  Eternal."  ^ 

In  truth,  Blake,  despite  the  imputation  of 
insanity  which  was  his  contemporaries'  and 
has  later  been  his  commentators'  refuge  from 
assenting  to  his  conclusions,  is  as  bold  a  thinker 
in  his  own  way  as  Neitzsche  and  as  consistent. 

1  Prof.  Raleigh. 


160    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

An  absolute  unity  of  belief  inspires  all  his  utter- 
ances, cryptic  and  plain.  That  he  never  succeeded 
in  founding  a  school  nor  gathering  followers  must 
be  put  down  in  the  first  place  to  the  form  in  which 
his  work  was  issued  (it  never  reached  the  public 
of  his  own  day)  and  the  dark  and  mysterious 
mythology  in  which  the  prophetic  books  which 
are  the  full  and  extended  statement  of  his  phi- 
losophy, are  couched,  and  in  the  second  place 
to  the  inherent  difficulty  of  the  philosophy 
itself.  As  he  himself  says,  where  we  read  black, 
he  reads  white.  For  the  common  distinction 
between  good  and  evil,  Blake  substitutes  the 
distinction  between  imagination  and  reason; 
and  reason,  the  rationalizing,  measuring,  com- 
paring faculty  by  which  we  come  to  impute 
praise  or  blame  is  the  only  evil  in  his  eyes.  "There 
is  nothing  either  good  or  bad  but  thinking  makes 
it  so";  to  rid  the  world  of  thinking,  to  substitute 
for  reason,  imagination,  and  for  thought,  vision, 
was  the  object  of  all  that  he  wrote  or  drew. 
The  implications  of  this  philosophy  carry  far, 
and  Blake  was  not  afraid  to  follow  where  they 
led  him.  Fortunately  for  those  who  hesitate 
to  embark  on  that  dark  and  adventurous  journey, 
his  work  contains  delightful  and  simpler  things. 
He  wrote  lyrics  of  extraordinary  freshness  and 
delicacy  and  spontaneity;  he  could  speak  in 
a  child's  voice  of  innocent  joys  and  sorrows 
and  the  simple  elemental  things.  His  odes  to 
"Spring"  and  "Autumn"  are  the  harbingers 
of  Keats.  Not  since  Shakespeare  and  Campion 
died  could  English  show  songs  like  his 

"My  silks  and  fine  array." 


THE  RO^LVNTIC  REVIVAL        161 

and  the  others  which  carry  the  Elizabethan  ac- 
cent. He  could  write  these  things  as  well  as  the 
Elizabethans.    In  others  he  was  unique. 

"Tiger!  Tiger!  burning  bright 
In  the  forests  of  the  night. 
What  immortal  hand  or  eye 
Could  frame  thy  fearful  symmetry." 

In  all  the  English  lyric  there  is  no  voice  so 
clear,  so  separate  or  distinctive  as  his. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL 
(1) 

There  are  two  ways  of  approaching  the  periods 
of  change  and  new  birth  in  literature.  The  com- 
}nonest  and,  for  all  the  study  which  it  entails, 
the  easiest,  is  that  summed  up  in  the  phrase, 
literature  begets  literature.  Following  it,  you 
discover  and  weigh  literary  influences,  the  influ- 
ence of  poet  on  poet,  and  book  on  book.  You 
find  one  man  harking  back  to  earlier  models  in 
his  own  tongue,  which  an  intervening  age  mis- 
understood or  despised;  another,  turning  to  the 
contemporary  literatures  of  neighbouring  coun- 
tries; another,  perhaps,  to  the  splendour  and 
exoticism  of  the  east.  In  the  matter  of  form  and 
style,  such  a  study  carries  you  far.  You  can  trace 
types  of  poetry  and  metres  back  to  curious  and 


162    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

unsuspected  originals,  find  the  well-known  verse 
of  Burns'  epistles  turning  up  in  Provengal; 
Tennyson's  In  Memoriam  stanza  in  use  by 
Ben  Jonson;  the  metre  of  Christahel  in  minor 
Elizabethan  poetry;  the  peculiar  form  of  Fitz- 
gerald's translation  of  Omar  Khayyam  followed 
by  so  many  imitators  since,  itseft  to  be  the 
actual  reflection  of  the  rough  metrical  scheme 
of  his  Persian  original.  But  such  a  study,  though 
it  is  profitable  and  interesting,  can  never  lead 
to  the  whole  truth.  As  we  saw  in  the  beginning 
of  this  book,  in  the  matter  of  the  Renaissance, 
every  age  of  discovery  and  re-birth  has  its  double 
aspect.  It  is  a  revolution  in  style  and  language, 
an  age  of  literary  experiment  and  achievement, 
but  its  experiments  are  dictated  by  the  excite- 
ment of  a  new  subject-matter,  and  that  subject- 
matter  is  so  much  in  the  air,  so  impalpable  and 
universal  that  it  eludes  analysis.  Only  you 
can  be  sure  that  it  is  this  weltering  contagion 
of  new  ideas,  and  new  thought — the  "Zeitgeist," 
the  spirit  of  the  age,  or  whatever  you  may  call 
it — that  is  the  essential  and  controlling  force. 
Literary  loans  and  imports  give  the  forms  into 
which  it  can  be  moulded,  but  without  them 
it  would  still  exist,  and  they  are  only  the  means 
by  which  a  spirit  which  is  in  life  itself,  and  which 
expresses  itself  in  action,  and  in  concrete  human 
achievement,  gets  itself  into  the  written  word. 
The  romantic  revival  numbers  Napoleon  amongst 
its  leaders  as  well  as  Byron,  Wellington,  Pitt  and 
Wilberforce,  as  well  as  Keats  and  Wordsworth. 
Only  the  literary  manifestations  of  the  time  con- 
cern us  here,  but  it  is  important  to  remember 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL        163 

that  the  passion  for  simplification  and  for  a 
return  to  nature  as  a  refuge  from  the  artificial 
complexities  of  society,  which  inspired  the 
Lyrical  Ballads,  inspired  no  less  the  course  of 
the  Revolution  in  France,  and  later,  the  de- 
struction by  Napoleon  of  the  smaller  feudal 
states  of  Germany,  which  made  possible  German 
nationality  and  a  national  spirit. 

In  this  romantic  revival,  however,  the  revolu- 
tion in  form  and  style  matters  more  than  in 
most.  The  classicism  of  the  previous  age  had  been 
so  fixed  and  immutable;  it  had  been  enthroned 
in  high  places,  enjoyed  the  esteem  of  society, 
arrogated  to  itself  the  acceptance  which  good 
breeding  and  good  manners  demanded.  Dry- 
den  had  been  a  Court  poet,  careful  to  change 
his  allegiance  with  the  changing  monarchy. 
Pope  had  been  the  equal  and  intimate  of  the 
great  people  of  his  day,  and  his  followers,  if 
they  did  not  enjoy  the  equality,  enjoyed  at 
any  rate  the  patronage  of  many  noble  lords. 
The  effect  of  this  was  to  give  the  prestige  of 
social  usage  to  the  verse  in  which  they  wrote 
and  the  language  they  used.  "There  was," 
said  Dr.  Johnson,  "before  the  time  of  Dryden 
no  poetical  diction,  no  system  of  words  at  once 
refined  from  the  grossness  of  domestic  use, 
and  free  from  the  harshness  of  terms  appro- 
priated to  particular  arts.  Words  too  familiar 
or  too  remote  to  defeat  the  purpose  of  a  poet." 
This  poetic  diction,  refined  from  the  gross- 
ness of  domestic  use,  was  the  standard  poetic 
speech  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The  heroic 
couplet  in  which  it  was  cast  was  the  standard 


164    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

metre.  So  that  the  first  object  of  the  revolt  of 
the  romantics  was  the  purely  literary  object 
of  getting  rid  of  the  vice  of  an  unreal  and  arti- 
ficial manner  of  writing.  They  desired  simplicity 
of  style. 

When  the  Lyrical  Ballads  of  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge  were  published  in  1798,  the  preface 
which  Wordsworth  wrote  as  their  manifesto 
hardly  touched  at  all  on  the  poetic  imagination 
or  the  attitude  of  the  poet  to  life  and  nature. 
The  only  question  is  that  of  diction.  "The 
majority  of  the  following  poems,"  he  writes,  "  are 
to  be  considered  as  experiments.  They  were 
written  chiefly  with  a  view  to  ascertain  how  far 
the  language  of  conversation  in  the  middle  and 
lower  classes  of  society  is  adapted  to  the  purposes 
of  poetic  pleasure."  And  in  the  longer  preface  to 
the  second  edition,  in  which  the  theories  of  the 
new  school  on  the  nature  and  methods  of  the 
poetic  imagination  are  set  forth  at  length,  he 
returns  to  the  same  point.  "The  language  too, 
of  these  men  (that  is  those  in  humble  and  rustic 
life)  has  been  adopted  .  .  .  because  such  men 
hourly  communicate  with  the  best  objects  from 
which  the  best  part  of  language  is  originally  de- 
rived, and  because  from  their  rank  in  society, 
and  the  sameness  and  narrow  circle  of  their  inter- 
course, being  less  under  the  influence  of  social 
vanity,  they  convey  their  feelings  and  notions  in 
simple  unelaborated  expressions."  Social  vanity 
— the  armour  which  we  wear  to  conceal  our 
deepest  thoughts  and  feelings — that  was  what 
Wordsworth  wished  to  be  rid  of,  and  he  chose  the 
language  of  the  common  people,  not  because  it 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL         165 

fitted,  as  an  earlier  school  of  poets  who  used  the 
common  speech  had  asserted,  the  utterance  of 
habitual  feeling  and  common  sense,  but  because 
it  is  the  most  sincere  expression  of  the  deepest 
and  rarest  passion.  His  object  was  the  object 
attained  by  Shakespeare  in  some  of  his  supremest 
moments;  the  bare  intolerable  force  of  the 
speeches  after  the  murder  of  Macbeth,  or  of 
King  Lear's 

"Do  not  laugh  at  me, 
For  as  I  am  a  man,  I  think  this  lady 
To  be  my  child  Cordelia." 

Here,  then,  was  one  avenue  of  revolt  from  the 
tyranny  of  artificiality,  the  getting  back  of  com- 
mon speech  into  poetry.  But  there  was  another, 
earlier  and  more  potent  in  its  effect.  The  eight- 
eenth century,  weary  of  its  own  good  sense  and 
sanity,  turned  to  the  Middle  Ages  for  picturesque- 
ness  and  relief.  Romance  of  course,  had  not  been 
dead  in  all  these  years,  when  Pope  and  Addison 
made  wit  and  good  sense  the  fashionable  temper 
for  writing.  There  was  a  strong  romantic  tra- 
dition in  the  eighteenth  century,  though  it  does 
not  give  its  character  to  the  writing  of  the  time. 
Dr.  Johnson  was  fond  of  old  romances.  When 
he  was  in  Skye  he  amused  himself  by  thinking 
of  his  Scottish  tour  as  the  journey  of  a  knight- 
errant.  "These  fictions  of  the  Gothic  romances," 
he  said,  "  are  not  so  remote  from  credibility  as 
is  commonly  supposed."  It  is  a  mistake  to  sup- 
pose that  the  passion  for  mediaevalism  began  with 
either  Coleridge  or  Scott.  Horace  Walpole  was 
as  enthusiastic  as  either  of  them;  good  eighteenth 


166    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

century  prelates  like  Hurd  and  Percy,  found  in 
what  they  called  the  Gothic  an  inexhaustible 
source  of  delight.  As  was  natural,  what  at- 
tracted them  in  the  Middle  Ages  was  not  their 
resemblances  to  the  time  they  lived  in,  but  the 
points  in  which  the  two  differed.  None  of  them 
had  knowledge  enough,  or  insight  enough,  to 
conceive  or  sympathize  with  the  humanity  of  the 
thirteenth  century,  to  shudder  at  its  cruelties  and 
hardnesses  and  persecutions,  or  to  comprehend 
the  spiritual  elevation  and  insight  of  its  rarest 
minds.  "It  was  art,"  said  William  Morris,  "art 
in  which  all  men  shared,  that  made  life  romantic  as 
people  called  it  in  those  days.  That  and  not 
robber  barons,  and  inaccessible  kings,  with  their 
hierarchy  of  serving  nobles,  and  other  rubbish." 
Morris  belonged  to  a  time  which  knew  its  middle 
ages  better.  To  the  eighteenth  century  the 
robber  barons  and  the  "other  rubbish"  were 
the  essence  of  romance.  For  Percy  and  his  fol- 
lowers, mediaevalism  was  a  collection  of  what 
actors  call  "properties"  gargoyles,  and  odds  and 
ends  of  armour  and  castle  keeps  with  secret 
passages,  banners  and  gay  colours,  and  gay 
shimmering  obsolete  words.  Mistaking  what 
was  on  its  surface  at  any  rate  a  subtle  and  com- 
plex civilization,  for  rudeness  and  quaintness, 
they  seemed  to  themselves  to  pass  back  into  a 
freer  air,  where  any  extravagance  was  possible, 
and  good  breeding  and  mere  circumspection  and 
restraint  vanished  like  the  wind. 

A  similar  longing  to  be  rid  of  the  precision 
and  order  of  everyday  life  drove  them  to  the 
mountains,  and  to  the  literature  of  Wales  and 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL         167 

the  Highlands,  to  Celtic,  or  pseudo-Celtic  ro- 
mance. To  the  fashion  of  the  time  mountains 
were  still  frowning  and  horrid  steeps;  in  Gray's 
Journal  of  his  tour  in  the  Lakes,  a  new  under- 
standing and  appreciation  of  nature  is  only  strug- 
gling through;  and  when  mountains  became 
fashionable,  it  was  at  first  and  remained  in  part 
at  least,  till  the  time  of  Byron,  for  those  very 
theatrical  qualities  which  had  hitherto  put  them 
in  abhorrence.  Wordsworth,  in  his  Lines  written 
above  Tintern  Abbey,  in  which  he  sets  forth  the 
succeeding  stages  of  his  mental  development, 
refers  to  this  love  of  the  mountains  for  their 
spectacular  qualities,  as  the  first  step  in  the 
progress  of  his  mind  to  poetic  maturity: 

"The  sounding  cataract 
Haunted  me  like  a  passion;  the  tall  rock. 
The  mountain  and  the  deep  and  gloomy  wood, 
Their  colours  and  their  forms  were  then  to  me 
An  appetite." 

This  same  passion  for  the  "sounding  cata- 
ract" and  the  "tall  rock,"  this  appetite  for  the 
deep  and  gloomy  wood,  gave  its  vogue  in  Words- 
worth's boyhood  to  Macpherson's  Ossian,  a  book 
which  whether  it  be  completely  fraudulent  or 
not,  was  of  capital  importance  in  the  beginnings 
of  the  romantic  movement. 

The  love  of  mediaeval  quaintness  and  obsolete 
words,  however,  led  to  a  more  important  liter- 
ary event — the  publication  of  Bishop  Percy's 
edition  of  the  ballads  in  the  Percy  folio — the 
Reliques  of  Ancient  Poetry.  Percy  to  his  own 
mind  knew  the  Middle  Ages  better  than  they 


168    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

knew  themselves,  and  he  took  care  to  dress  to 
advantage  the  rudeness  and  plainness  of  his 
originals.  Perhaps  we  should  not  blame  him. 
Sir  Walter  Scott  did  the  same  with  better  tact 
and  skill  in  his  Border  minstrelsy,  and  how  many 
distinguished  editors  are  there,  who  have  tamed 
and  smoothed  down  the  natural  wildness  and 
irregularity  of  Blake.''  But  it  is  more  important 
to  observe  that  when  Percy's  reliques  came  to 
have  their  influence  on  writing  his  additions 
were  imitated  as  much  as  the  poems  on  which 
he  grafted  them.  Chatterton's  Rowley  Poems, 
which  in  many  places  seem  almost  inconceivably 
banal  and  artificial  to  us  to-day,  caught  their 
accent  from  the  episcopal  editor  as  much  as  from 
the  ballads  themselves.  None  the  less,  whatever 
its  fault,  Percy's  collection  gave  its  impetus  to 
one  half  of  the  romantic  movement;  it  was 
eagerly  read  in  Germany,  and  when  it  came 
to  influence  Scott  and  Coleridge  it  did  so  not 
only  directly,  but  through  Burger's  imitation 
of  it;  it  began  the  modem  study  and  love  of 
the  ballad  which  has  given  us  Sister  Heleriy  the 
White  Ship,  a-nd  the  Lady  of  Shalott. 

But  the  romantic  revival  goes  deeper  than 
any  change,  however  momentous  of  fashion  or 
style.  It  meant  certain  fundamental  changes 
in  human  outlook.  In  the  first  place,  one  notices 
in  the  authors  of  the  time  an  extraordinary 
development  of  imaginative  sensibility;  the 
mind  at  its  countless  points  of  contact  with 
the  sensuous  world  and  the  world  of  thought, 
seems  to  become  more  aHve  and  alert.  It  is 
more    sensitive    to    fine    impressions,    to    finely 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL        169 

graded  shades  of  difference.  Outward  objects 
and  philosophical  ideas  seem  to  increase  in  their 
content  and  their  meaning,  and  acquire  a  new 
power  to  enrich  the  intensest  life  of  the  human 
spirit.  Mountains  and  lakes,  the  dignity  of 
the  peasant,  the  terror  of  the  supernatural, 
scenes  of  history,  mediaeval  architecture  and 
armour,  and  mediaeval  thought  and  poetry,  the 
arts  and  mythology  of  Greece — all  became 
springs  of  poetic  inspiration  and  poetic  joy. 
The  impressions  of  all  these  things  were  unfa- 
miliar and  ministered  to  a  sense  of  wonder,  and 
by  that  very  fact  they  were  classed  as  romantic, 
as  modes  of  escape  from  a  settled  way  of  life. 
But  they  were  also  in  a  sense  familiar  too.  The 
mountains  made  their  appeal  to  a  deep  implanted 
feeling  in  man,  to  his  native  sense  of  his  own 
worth  and  dignity  and  splendour  as  a  part  of 
nature,  and  his  recognition  of  natural  scenery 
as  necessary,  and  in  its  fullest  meaning  as  suffi- 
cient for  his  spiritual  needs.  They  called  him 
back  from  the  artificiality  and  complexity  of 
the  cities  he  had  built  for  himself,  and  the  society 
he  had  weaved  round  him,  to  the  natural  world 
in  which  Providence  had  planted  him  of  old, 
and  which  was  full  of  significance  for  his  soul. 
The  greatest  poets  of  the  romantic  revival  strove 
to  capture  and  convey  the  influence  of  nature  on 
the  mind,  and  of  the  mind  on  nature  interpene- 
trating one  another.  They  were  none  the  less 
artists  because  they  approached  nature  in  a 
state  of  passive  receptivity.  They  believed  in 
the  autocracy  of  the  individual  imagination 
none  the  less  because  their  mission  was  to  divine 


170    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

nature  and  to  understand  her,  rather  than  to 
correct  her  profusions  in  the  name  of  art. 

In  the  second  place  the  romantic  revival 
meant  a  development  of  the  historical  sense. 
Thinkers  like  Burke  and  Montesquieu  helped 
students  of  politics  to  acquire  perspective;  to 
conceive  modern  institutions  not  as  things  sepa- 
rate, and  separately  created,  but  as  conditioned 
by,  and  evolved  from,  the  institutions  of  an 
earlier  day.  Even  the  revolutionary  spirit  of 
the  time  looked  both  before  and  after,  and 
took  history  as  well  as  the  human  perfectibility 
imagined  by  philosophers  into  its  purview.  In 
France  the  reformers  appealed  in  the  first  instance 
for  a  States  General — a  mediaeval  institution — 
as  the  corrective  of  their  wrongs,  and  later  when 
they  could  not,  like  their  neighbours  in  Bel- 
gium, demand  reform  by  way  of  the  restoration 
of  their  historical  rights,  they  were  driven  to 
go  a  step  further  back  still,  beyond  history  to 
what  they  conceived  to  be  primitive  society, 
and  demand  the  rights  of  man.  This  develop- 
ment of  the  historical  sense,  which  had  such 
a  widespread  influence  on  politics,  got  itself 
into  literature  in  the  creation  of  the  historical 
novel.  Scott  and  Chateaubriand  revived  the  old 
romance  in  which  by  a  peculiar  ingenuity  of  form, 
the  adventures  of  a  typical  hero  of  fiction  are 
cast  in  a  historical  setting  and  set  about  with 
portraits  of  real  personages.  The  historical 
sense  affected,  too,  novels  dealing  with  con- 
temporary life.  Scott's  best  work,  his  novels 
of  Scottish  character,  catch  more  than  half 
their    excellence    from    the    richness    of    colour 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL         171 

and  proportion  which  the  portraiture  of  the  living 
people  acquires  when  it  is  aided  by  historical 
knowledge  and  imagination. 

Lastly,  besides  this  awakened  historical  sense, 
and  this  quickening  of  imaginative  sensibility 
to  the  message  of  nature,  the  Romantic  revival 
brought  to  literature  a  revival  of  the  sense  of 
the  connection  between  the  visible  world  and 
another  world  which  is  unseen.  The  super- 
natural which  in  all  but  the  crudest  of  mechan- 
isms had  been  out  of  English  literature  since 
Macbeth,  took  hold  on  the  imaginations  of  authors, 
and  brought  with  it  a  new  subtlety  and  a  new 
and  nameless  horror  and  fascination.  There 
is  nothing  in  earlier  English  literature  to  set 
beside  the  strange  and  terrible  indefiniteness 
of  the  Ancient  Mariner,  and  though  much  in 
this  kind  has  been  written  since,  we  have  not 
got  far  beyond  the  skill  and  imagination  with 
which  Coleridge  and  Scott  worked  on  the 
instinctive  fears  that  lie  buried  in  the  human 
mind. 

Of  all  these  aspects  of  the  revival,  however, 
the  new  sensitiveness  and  accessibility  to  the 
influences  of  external  nature  was  the  most 
pervasive  and  the  most  important.  Words- 
worth speaks  for  the  love  that  is  in  homes  where 
poor  men  lie,  the  daily  teaching  that  is  in 

"Woods  and  rills; 
The  silence  that  is  in  the  starry  sky. 
The  peace  that  is  among  the  lonely  hills." 

Shelley  for  the  wildness  of  the  west  wind,  and 
the  ubiquitous  spiritual  emotion  which  speaks 


172    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

equally  in  the  song  of  a  skylark  or  a  political 
revolution.  Byron  for  the  swing  and  roar  of 
the  sea.  Keats  for  verdurous  glooms  and  wind- 
ing mossy  ways.  Scott  and  Coleridge,  though 
like  Byron  they  are  less  with  nature  than  with 
romance,  share  the  same  communion. 

This  imaginative  sensibility  of  the  romantics 
not  only  deepened  their  communion  with  nature, 
it  brought  them  into  a  truer  relation  with  what 
had  before  been  created  in  literature  and  art. 
The  romantic  revival  is  the  Golden  Age  of  Eng- 
lish criticism;  all  the  poets  were  critics  of  one 
sort  or  another — either  formally  in  essays  and 
prefaces,  or  in  passing  and  desultory  flashes  of 
illumination  in  their  correspondence.  Words- 
worth, in  his  prefaces,  in  his  letter  to  a  friend  of 
Burns  which  contains  such  a  breadtli  and  clarity 
of  wisdom  on  things  that  seem  alien  to  his  sym- 
pathies, even  in  some  of  his  poems;  Coleridge, 
in  his  Biographia  Literaria,  in  his  notes  on 
Shakespeare,  in  those  rhapsodies  at  Highgate 
which  were  the  basis  for  his  recorded  table 
talk;  Keats  in  his  letters;  Shelley  in  his  Defence 
of  Poetry;  Byron  in  his  satires  and  journals; 
Scott  in  those  lives  of  the  novelists  which  con- 
tain so  much  truth  and  insight  into  the  works 
of  fellow  craftsmen — they  are  all  to  be  found 
turning  the  new  acuteness  of  impression  which 
was  in  the  air  they  breathed,  to  the  study  of 
literature,  as  well  as  to  the  study  of  nature. 
Alongside  of  them  were  two  authors.  Lamb 
and  Hazlitt,  whose  bent  was  rather  critical 
than  creative,  and  the  best  part  of  whose  intelli- 
gence and  sympathy  was  spent  on  the  sensitive 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL         173 

and  loving  divination  of  our  earlier  literature. 
With  these  two  men  began  the  criticism  of  act- 
ing and  of  pictorial  art  that  have  developed  since 
into  two  of  the  main  kinds  of  modern  critical 
writing. 

Romantic  criticism,  both  in  its  end  and  its 
method,  differs  widely  from  that  of  Dr.  John- 
son and  his  school.  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge 
were  concerned  with  deep-seated  qualities  and 
temperamental  differences.  Their  critical  work 
revolved  round  their  conception  of  the  fancy 
and  the  imagination,  the  one  dealing  with  nature 
on  the  surface  and  decorating  it  with  imagery, 
the  other  penetrating  to  its  deeper  significances. 
Hazlitt  and  Lamb  applied  their  analogous  con- 
ception of  wit  as  a  lower  quality  than  humour, 
in  the  same  fashion.  Dr.  Johnson  looked  on  the 
other  hand  for  correctness  of  form,  for  the  sub- 
ordination of  the  parts  to  the  whole,  for  the  self- 
restraint  and  good  sense  which  common  manners 
would  demand  in  society,  and  wisdom  in  practical 
life.  His  school  cared  more  for  large  general 
outlines  than  for  truth  in  detail.  They  would 
not  permit  the  idiosyncrasy  of  a  personal  or 
individual  point  of  view:  hence  they  were  inca- 
pable of  understanding  lyricism,  and  they  pre- 
ferred those  forms  of  writing  which  set  themselves 
to  express  the  ideas  and  feelings  that  most  men 
may  be  supposed  to  have  in  common.  Dr. 
Johnson  thought  a  bombastic  and  rhetorical 
passage  in  Congreve's  Mourning  Bride  better 
than  the  famous  description  of  Dover  cliff  in 
King  Lear.  "  The  crows,  sir,"  he  said  of  the  latter, 
"impede  your  fall."    Their  town  breeding,  and 


174    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

possibly,  as  we  saw  in  the  case  of  Dr.  Johnson,  an 
actual  physical  disability,  made  them  distrust 
any  clear  and  sympathetic  rendering  of  the  sense 
impressions  which  nature  creates.  One  cannot 
imagine  Dr.  Johnson  caring  much  for  the  minute 
observations  of  Tennyson's  nature  poems,  or 
delighting  in  the  verdurous  and  mossy  alleys  of 
Keats.  His  test  in  such  a  case  would  be  simple; 
he  would  not  have  liked  to  have  been  in  such 
places,  nor  reluctantly  compelled  to  go  there 
would  he  in  all  likelihood  have  had  much  to  say 
about  them  beyond  that  they  were  damp.  For 
the  poetry — such  as  Shelley's — which  worked  by 
means  of  impalpable  and  indefinite  suggestion, 
he  would,  one  may  conceive,  have  cared  even 
less.  New  modes  of  poetry  asked  of  critics  new 
sympathies  and  a  new  way  of  approach.  But 
it  is  time  to  turn  to  the  authors  themselves. 


(2) 

The  case  of  Wordsworth  is  peculiar.  In  his 
own  day  he  was  vilified  and  misunderstood; 
poets  like  Byron,  whom  most  of  us  would  now 
regard  simply  as  depending  from  the  school 
he  created,  sneered  at  him.  Shelley  and  Keats 
failed  to  understand  him  or  his  motives;  he 
was  suspected  of  apostasy,  and  when  he  became 
poet  laureate  he  was  written  off  as  a  turn-coat 
who  had  played  false  to  the  ideals  of  his  youth. 
Now  common  opinion  regards  him  as  a  poet 
above  all  the  others  of  his  age,  and  amongst 
all  the  English  poets   standing  beside  Milton, 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL        175 

but  a  step  below  Shakespeare  himself — and  we 
know  more  about  him,  more  about  the  processes 
by  which  his  soul  moved  from  doubts  to  cer- 
tainties, from  troubles  to  triumph,  than  we  do 
about  any  other  author  we  have.  This  knowl- 
edge we  have  from  the  poem  called,  The  Prelude, 
which  was  pubhshed  after  his  death.  It  was 
designed  to  be  only  the  opening  and  explana- 
tory section  of  a  philosophical  poem,  which  was 
never  completed.  Had  it  been  pubhshed  earlier 
it  would  have  saved  Wordsworth  from  the  cold- 
ness and  neglect  he  suffered  at  the  hands 
of  younger  men  like  Shelley;  it  might  even 
have  made  their  work  different  from  what  it 
is.  It  has  made  Wordsworth  very  clear  to  us 
now, 

Wordsworth  is  that  rarest  thing  amongst  poets, 
a  complete  innovator.  He  looked  at  things  in 
a  new  way.  He  found  his  subjects  in  new  places; 
and  he  put  them  into  a  new  poetic  form.  At 
the  turning  point  of  his  Ufe,  in  his  early  man- 
hood, he  made  one  great  discovery,  had  one 
great  vision.  By  the  light  of  that  vision  and  to 
communicate  that  discovery  he  wrote  his  great- 
est work.  By  and  by  the  vision  faded,  the  world 
fell  back  into  the  light  of  common  day,  his  phi- 
losophy passed  from  discovery  to  acceptance,  and 
all  unknown  to  him  his  pen  fell  into  a  common 
way  of  writing.  The  faculty  of  reading  which 
has  added  fuel  to  the  fire  of  so  many  waning 
inspirations  was  denied  him.  He  was  much 
too  self-centred  to  lose  himself  in  the  works 
of  others.  Only  the  shock  of  a  change  of  envi- 
ronment— a  tour  in  Scotland,  or  abroad — shook 


176    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

him  into  his  old  thrill  of  imagination,  so  that 
a  few  fine  things  fitfully  illumine  the  enormous 
and  dreary  bulk  of  his  later  work.  If  we  lost 
all  but  the  Lyrical  Ballads,  the  poems  of  1804, 
and  the  Prelude,  and  the  Excursion,  Words- 
worth's position  as  a  poet  would  be  no  lower 
than  it  is  now,  and  he  would  be  more  readily 
accepted  by  those  who  still  find  themselves  un- 
certain about  him. 

The  determining  factor  in  his  career  was  the 
French  Revolution — that  great  movement  which 
besides  re-making  France  and  Europe,  made 
our  very  modes  of  thinking  anew.  While  an 
undergraduate  in  Cambridge  Wordsworth  made 
several  vacation  visits  to  France.  The  first 
peaceful  phase  of  the  Revolution  was  at  its  height; 
France  and  the  assembly  were  dominated  by  the 
little  group  of  revolutionary  orators  who  took 
their  name  from  the  south-western  province 
from  which  most  of  them  came,  and  with  this 
group — the  Girondists — Wordsworth  threw  in 
his  lot.  Had  he  remained  he  would  probably 
have  gone  with  them  to  the  guillotine.  As  it 
was,  the  commands  of  his  guardian  brought  him 
back  to  England,  and  he  was  forced  to  contem- 
plate from  a  distance  the  struggle  in  which  he 
burned  to  take  an  active  part.  One  is  accus- 
tomed to  think  of  Wordsworth  as  a  mild  old 
man,  but  such  a  picture  if  it  is  thrown  back  as  a 
presentment  of  the  Wordsworth  of  tlie  nineties 
is  a  far  way  from  the  truth.  This  darkly  pas- 
sionate man  tortured  himself  with  his  longings 
and  his  horror.  War  came  and  the  prayers  for 
victory  in  churches  found  him  in  his  heart  pray- 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL        177 

ing  for  defeat;  then  came  the  execution  of  the 
king;  then  the  plot  which  slew  the  Gironde. 
Before  all  this  Wordsworth  trembled  as  Hamlet 
did  when  he  learned  the  ghost's  story.  His  faith 
in  the  world  was  shaken.  First  his  own  country 
had  taken  up  arms  against  what  he  believed  to 
be  the  cause  of  liberty.  Then  faction  had  de- 
stroyed his  friends  whom  he  believed  to  be  its 
standard  bearers.  What  was  in  the  world,  in 
religion,  in  morality  that  such  things  could  be.'* 
In  the  face  of  this  tremendous  problem,  Words- 
worth, unlike  Hamlet,  was  resolute  and  deter- 
mined. It  was,  perhaps,  characteristic  of  him 
that  in  his  desire  to  get  his  feet  on  firm  rock  again 
he  fled  for  a  time  to  the  exactest  of  sciences — to 
mathematics.  But  though  he  got  certainties 
there,  they  must  have  been,  one  judges,  certain- 
ties too  arid  for  his  thirsting  mind.  Then  he 
made  his  great  discovery — helped  to  it,  perhaps, 
by  his  sister  Dorothy  and  his  friend  Coleridge — 
he  found  nature,  and  in  nature,  peace. 

Not  a  very  wonderful  discovery,  you  will  say, 
but  though  the  cleansing  and  healing  force  of 
natural  surroundings  on  the  mind  is  a  familiar 
enough  idea  in  our  own  day,  that  is  only  because 
Wordsworth  found  it.  When  he  gave  his  mes- 
sage to  the  world  it  was  a  new  message.  It  is 
worth  while  remembering  that  it  is  still  an  un- 
accepted one.  Most  of  his  critics  still  consider 
it  only  Wordsworth's  fun  when  he  wrote: 

"One  impulse  from  the  vernal  wood 
Can  teach  us  more  of  man. 
Of  moral  evil  and  of  good. 
Than  all  the  sages  can." 


178    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

Yet  Wordsworth  really  believed  that  moral  les- 
sons and  ideas  were  to  be  gathered  from  trees  and 
stones.  It  was  the  main  part  of  his  teaching. 
He  claimed  that  his  own  morality  had  been  so 
furnished  him,  and  he  wrote  his  poetry  to  con- 
vince other  people  that  what  had  been  true  for 
him  could  be  true  for  them  too. 

For  him  life  was  a  series  of  impressions,  and 
the  poet's  duty  was  to  recapture  those  impres- 
sions, to  isolate  them  and  brood  over  them,  till 
gradually  as  a  result  of  his  contemplation  emotion 
stirred  again — an  emotion  akin  to  the  authentic 
thrill  that  had  excited  him  when  the  impression 
was  first  born  in  experience.  Then  poetry  is 
made;  this  emotion  "recollected"  as  Words- 
worth said  (we  may  add,  re-created)  "  in  tranquil- 
lity" passes  into  enduring  verse.  He  treasured 
numberless  experiences  of  this  kind  in  his  own 
life.  Some  of  them  are  set  forth  in  the  Prelude, 
that  for  instance  on  which  the  poem  The  Thorn  in 
the  Lyrical  Ballads  is  based;  they  were  one  or 
other  of  them  the  occasion  of  most  of  his  poems; 
the  best  of  them  produced  his  finest  work — such 
a  poem  for  instance  as  Resolution  and  Independ- 
ence or  Gipsies,  where  some  chance  sight  met 
with  in  one  of  the  poet's  walks  is  brooded  over 
till  it  becomes  charged  wath  a  tremendous  signifi- 
cance for  him  and  for  all  the  world.  If  we  ask 
how  he  differentiated  his  experiences,  which  had 
most  value  for  him,  we  shall  find  something 
deficient.  That  is  to  say,  things  which  were 
unique  and  precious  to  him  do  not  always  appear 
so  to  his  readers.  He  counted  as  gold  much 
that  we  regard  as  dross.     But  though  we  may 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL         179 

diflFer  from  his  judgments,  the  test  which  he  ap- 
plied to  his  recollected  impressions  is  clear.  He 
attached  most  value  to  those  which  brought  with 
them  the  sense  of  an  indwelling  spirit,  transfusing 
and  interpenetrating  all  nature,  transfiguring 
with  its  radiance,  rocks  and  fields  and  trees  and 
the  men  and  women  who  lived  close  enough  to 
them  to  partake  of  their  strength — the  sense,  as 
he  calls  it  in  his  Lines  above  T intern  Abbey  of 
something  "more  deeply  interfused"  by  which 
all  nature  is  made  one.  Sometimes,  as  in  the 
hymn  to  Duty,  it  is  conceived  as  law.  Duty 
before  whom  the  flowers  laugh,  is  the  daughter 
of  the  voice  of  God,  through  whom  the  most 
ancient  heavens  are  fresh  and  strong.  But  in 
most  of  his  poems  its  ends  do  not  trouble;  it  is 
omnipresent;  it  penetrates  everything  and  trans- 
figures everything;  it  is  God.  It  was  Words- 
worth's belief  that  the  perception  of  this  indwelling 
spirit  weakened  as  age  grew.  For  a  few  precious 
and  glorious  years  he  had  the  vision 

"When  meadow,  grove,  and  stream. 
The  earth,  and  every  common  sight 

To  me  did  seem 
Apparelled  in  celestial  light. 

The  glory  and  the  freshness  of  a  dream." 

Then  as  childhood,  when  "these  intimations  of 
immortality,"  this  perception  of  the  infinite  are 
most  strong,  passed  further  and  further  away, 
the  vision  faded  and  he  was  left  gazing  in  the 
light  of  common  day.  He  had  his  memories  and 
that  was  all. 
There  is,  of  course,  more  in  the  matter  than 


180    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

this,  and  Wordsworth's  beliefs  were  inextricably 
entangled  with  the  conception  which  Coleridge 
borrowed  from  German  philosophy. 

"We  receive  here  what  we  give" 

wrote  Coleridge  to  his  friend, 

"And  in  our  life  alone  doth  Nature  live." 

And  Wordsworth  came  to  know  that  the  light  he 
had  imagined  to  be  bestowed,  was  a  light  reflected 
from  his  own  mind.  It  is  easy  to  pass  from  criti- 
cism to  metaphysics  where  Coleridge  leads,  and 
wise  not  to  follow. 

If  Wordsworth  represents  that  side  of  the  Ro- 
mantic Revival  which  is  best  described  as  the 
return  to  Nature,  Coleridge  has  justification  for 
the  phrase  "Renascence  of  Wonder."  He  revived 
the  supernatural  as  a  literary  force,  emancipated 
it  from  the  crude  mechanism  which  had  been 
applied  to  it  by  dilettantes  like  Horace  Walpole 
and  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  and  invested  it  instead  with 
that  air  of  suggestion  and  indefiniteness  which 
gives  the  highest  potency  to  it  in  its  effect  on  the 
imagination.  But  Coleridge  is  more  noteworthy 
for  what  he  suggested  to  others  than  for  what  he 
did  in  himself.  His  poetry  is,  even  more  than 
Wordsworth's,  unequal;  he  is  capable  of  large 
tracts  of  dreariness  and  flatness;  he  seldom 
finished  what  he  began.  The  Ancient  Mariner y 
indeed,  which  was  the  fruit  of  his  close  compan- 
ionship with  Wordsworth,  is  the  only  completed 
thing  of  the  highest  quality  in  the  whole  of  his 
work.  Christabel  is  a  splendid  fragment;  for  years 
the  first  part  lay  uncompleted  and  when  the  odd 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL         181 

accident  of  an  evening's  intoxication  led  him  to 
commence  the  second,  the  inspiration  had  fled. 
For  the  second  part,  by  giving  to  the  fairy  at- 
mosphere of  the  first  a  local  habitation  and  a 
name,  robbed  it  of  its  most  precious  quality;  what 
it  gave  in  exchange  was  something  the  public 
could  get  better  from  Scott.  Kubla  Khan  went 
unfinished  because  the  call  of  a  friend  broke  the 
thread  of  the  reverie  in  which  it  was  composed. 
In  the  end  came  opium  and  oceans  of  talk  at 
Highgate  and  fouled  the  springs  of  poetry. 
Coleridge  never  fulfilled  the  promise  of  his  early 
days  with  Wordsworth.  "He  never  spoke  out." 
But  it  is  on  the  lines  laid  down  by  his  share  in  the 
pioneer  work  rather  than  on  the  lines  of  Words- 
worth's that  the  second  generation  of  Romantic 
poets — that  of  Shelley  and  Keats — developed. 

The  work  of  Wordsworth  was  conditioned  by 
the  French  Revolution  but  it  hardly  embodied 
the  revolutionary  spirit.  What  he  conceived  to 
be  its  excesses  revolted  him,  and  though  he  sought 
and  sang  freedom,  he  found  it  rather  in  the  later 
revolt  of  the  nationalities  against  the  Revolution 
as  manifested  in  Napoleon  himself.  The  spirit  of 
the  revolution,  as  it  was  understood  in  France 
and  in  Europe,  had  to  wait  for  Shelley  for  its 
complete  expression.  Freedom  is  the  breath  of 
his  work — freedom  not  only  from  the  tyranny 
of  earthly  powers,  but  from  the  tyranny  of 
religion,  expressing  itself  in  republicanism,  in 
atheism,  and  in  complete  emancipation  from 
the  current  moral  code  both  in  conduct  and 
in  writing.  The  reaction  which  had  followed 
the  overthrow  of  Napoleon  at  Waterloo,  sent 


182    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

a  wave  of  absolutism  and  repression  all  over 
Europe.  Italy  returned  under  the  heel  of  Austria; 
the  Bourbons  were  restored  in  France;  in  England 
came  the  days  of  Castlereagh  and  Peterloo.  The 
poetry  of  Shelley  is  the  expression  of  what  the 
children  of  the  revolution — men  and  women  who 
were  brought  up  in  and  believed  the  revolutionary 
gospel — thought  about  these  things. 

But  it  is  more  than  that.  Of  no  poet  in  Eng- 
lish, nor  perhaps  in  any  other  tongue,  could  it 
be  said  with  more  surety,  that  the  pursuit  of  the 
spirit  of  beauty  dominates  all  his  work.  For 
Shelley  it  interfused  all  nature  and  to  possess  it 
was  the  goal  of  all  endeavour.  The  visible  world 
and  the  world  of  thought  mingle  themselves 
inextricably  in  his  contemplation  of  it.  For  him 
there  is  no  boundary-line  between  the  two,  the 
one  is  as  real  and  actual  as  the  other.  In  his 
hands  that  old  trick  of  the  poets,  the  simile, 
takes  on  a  new  and  surprising  form.  He  does 
not  enforce  the  creations  of  his  imagination  by 
the  analogy  of  natural  appearances;  his  instinct 
is  just  the  opposite — to  describe  and  illumine 
nature  by  a  reference  to  the  creatures  of  thought. 
Other  poets,  Keats  for  instance,  or  Tennyson, 
or  the  older  poets  like  Dante  and  Homer,  might 
compare  ghosts  flying  from  an  enchanter  like 
leaves  flying  before  the  wind.  They  might  de- 
scribe a  poet  wrapped  up  in  his  dreams  as  being 
like  a  bird  singing  invisible  in  the  brightness 
of  the  sky.  But  Shelley  can  write  of  the  west 
wind  as 

"  Before  whose  unseen  presence  the  leaves,  dead. 

Are  driven  like  ghosts  from  an  enchanter  fleeing." 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL        183 

and  he  can  describe  a  skylark  in  the  heavens  as 

"Like  a  poet  hidden 

In  the  light  of  thought." 

Of  all  English  poets  he  is  the  most  completely 
lyrical.  Nothing  that  he  wrote  but  is  wrought 
out  of  the  anguish  or  joy  of  his  own  heart. 

"Most  wretched  souls," 
he  writes 

"  Are  cradled  into  poetry  by  wrong 
They  learn  in  suffering  what  they  teach  in  song." 

Perhaps  his  work  is  too  impalpable  and  moves  in 
an  air  too  rarefied.  It  sometimes  lacks  strength. 
It  fails  to  take  grip  enough  of  Ufe.  Had  he  lived 
he  might  have  given  it  these  things;  there  are  signs 
in  his  last  poems  that  he  would  have  given  it. 
But  he  could  hardly  have  bettered  the  sheer  and 
triumphant  lyricism  of  The  Skylark,  of  some  of 
his  choruses,  and  of  the  Ode  to  Dejection,  and 
of  the  Lines  written  on  the  Euganean  Hills. 

If  the  Romantic  sense  of  the  one-ness  of  nature 
found  its  highest  exponent  in  Shelley,  the  Roman- 
tic sensibility  to  outward  impressions  reached 
its  climax  in  Keats.  For  him  life  is  a  series  of 
sensations,  felt  with  almost  febrile  acuteness. 
Records  of  sight  and  touch  and  smell  crowd  every 
line  of  his  work;  the  scenery  of  a  garden  in  Hamp- 
stead  becomes  like  a  landscape  in  the  tropics,  so 
extraordinary  vivid  and  detailed  is  his  appre- 
hension and  enjoyment  of  what  it  has  to  give 
him.  The  luxuriance  of  his  sensations  is  matched 
by  the  luxuriance  of  his  powers  of  expression. 
Adjectives  heavily  charged  with  messages  for  the 


184    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

senses,  crowd  every  line  of  his  work,  and  in  his 
earlier  poems  overlay  so  heavily  the  thought  they 
are  meant  to  convey  that  all  sense  of  sequence 
and  structure  is  apt  to  be  smothered  under  their 
weight.  Not  that  consecutive  thought  claims  a 
place  in  his  conception  of  his  poetry.  His  ideal 
was  passive  contemplation  rather  than  active 
mental  exertion.  "O  for  a  life  of  sensations 
rather  than  of  thoughts,"  he  exclaims  in  one  of 
his  letters;  and  in  another,  "It  is  more  noble  to 
sit  like  Jove  than  to  fly  like  Mercury."  His 
work  has  one  message  and  one  only,  the  lasting- 
ness  of  beauty  and  its  supreme  truth.  It  is 
stated  in  Endymion  in  lines  that  are  worn  bare 
with  quotation.  It  is  stated  again,  at  the  height 
of  his  work  in  his  greatest  ode, 

"Beauty  is  truth,  truth  beauty:  that  is  all 
We  know  on  earth  and  all  we  need  to  know." 

His  work  has  its  defects;  he  died  at  twenty-six 
so  it  would  be  a  miracle  if  it  were  not  so.  He 
lacks  taste  and  measure;  he  offends  by  an  over- 
luxuriousness  and  sensuousness;  he  fails  when  he 
is  concerned  with  flesh  and  blood;  he  is  apt,  as 
Mr.  Robert  Bridges  has  said,  "to  class  women 
with  roses  and  sweetmeats."  But  in  his  short  life 
he  attained  with  surprising  rapidity  and  complete- 
ness to  poetic  maturity,  and  perhaps  from  no  other 
poet  could  we  find  things  to  match  his  greatest — 
Hyperion,  Isabella,  the  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  and  the 
Odes. 

There  remains  a  poet  over  whom  opinion  is 
more  sharply  divided  than  it  is  about  any  other 
writer  in  English.    In  his  day  Lord  Byron  was 


THE  ROIVIANTIC  REVIVAL         185 

the  idol,  not  only  of  his  countrymen,  but  of 
Europe.  Of  all  the  poets  of  the  time  he  was,  if 
we  except  Scott,  whose  vogue  he  eclipsed,  the 
only  one  whose  work  was  universally  known  and 
popular.  Everybody  read  him;  he  was  admired 
not  only  by  the  multitude  and  by  his  equals, 
but  by  at  least  one  who  was  his  superior,  the 
German  poet  Goethe,  who  did  not  hesitate  to 
say  of  him  that  he  was  the  greatest  talent  of  the 
century.  Though  this  exalted  opinion  still  per- 
sists on  the  Continent,  hardly  anyone  could  be 
found  in  England  to  subscribe  to  it  now.  With- 
out insularity,  we  may  claim  to  be  better  judges 
of  authors  in  our  own  tongue  than  foreign  critics, 
however  distinguished  and  comprehending.  How 
then  shall  be  explained  Lord  Byron's  instant  pop- 
ularity and  the  position  he  won.'*  What  were  the 
qualities  which  gave  him  the  power  he  enjoyed? 

In  the  first  place  he  appealed  by  virtue  of 
his  subject-matter — the  desultory  wanderings  of 
Childe  Harold  traversed  ground  every  mile  of  which 
was  memorable  to  men  who  had  watched  the 
struggle  which  had  been  going  on  in  Europe 
with  scarcely  a  pause  for  twenty  years.  Descrip- 
tive journalism  was  then  and  for  nearly  half  a 
century  afterwards  unknown,  and  the  poem  by 
its  descriptiveness,  by  its  appeal  to  the  curiosity 
of  its  readers,  made  the  same  kind  of  success  that 
vividly  written  special  correspondence  would  to- 
day, the  charm  of  metre  super-added.  Lord  Byron 
gave  his  readers  something  more,  too,  than  mere 
description.  He  added  to  it  the  charm  of  a  per- 
sonality, and  when  that  personality  was  enforced 
by  a  title,   when  it  proclaimed  its   sorrows  as 


186    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

the  age's  sorrows,  endowed  itself  with  an  air  of 
symbolism  and  set  itself  up  as  a  kind  of  scape- 
goat for  the  nation's  sins,  its  triumph  was  com- 
plete. Most  men  have  from  time  to  time  to 
resist  the  temptation  to  pose  to  themselves;  many 
do  not  even  resist  it.  For  all  those  who  chose 
to  believe  themselves  blighted  by  pessimism, 
and  for  all  the  others  who  would  have  loved 
to  believe  it,  Byron  and  his  poetry  came  as  an 
echo  of  themselves.  Shallow  called  to  shallow. 
Men  found  in  him,  as  their  sons  found  more 
reputably  in  Tennyson,  a  picture  of  what  they 
conceived  to  be  the  state  of  their  own  minds. 

But  he  was  not  altogether  a  man  of  pretence. 
He  really  and  passionately  loved  freedom;  no  one 
can  question  his  sincerity  in  that.  He  could  be 
a  fine  and  scathing  satirist;  and  though  he  was 
careless,  he  had  great  poetic  gifts. 


(3) 

The  age  of  the  Romantic  Revival  was  one  of 
poetry  rather  than  of  prose;  it  was  in  poetry 
that  the  best  minds  of  the  time  found  their 
means  of  expression.  But  it  produced  prose  of 
rare  quality  too,  and  there  is  delightful  reading 
in  the  works  of  its  essayists  and  occasional 
writers.  In  its  form  the  periodical  essay  had 
changed  little  since  it  was  first  made  popular  by 
Addison  and  Steele.  It  remained,  primarily,  a 
vehicle  for  the  expression  of  a  personality,  and 
it  continued  to  seek  the  interests  of  its  readers 
by  creating  or  suggesting  an  individuality  strong 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL        187 

enough  to  carry  off  any  desultory  adventure 
by  the  mere  force  of  its  own  attractiveness. 
Yet  there  is  all  the  difference  in  the  world  be- 
tween Hazlitt  and  Addison,  or  Lamb  and  Steele. 
The  Taller  and  the  Spectator  leave  you  with  a 
sense  of  artifice;  Hazlitt  and  Lamb  leave  you 
with  a  grip  of  a  real  personality — in  the  one  case 
very  vigorous  and  combative,  in  the  other  set 
about  with  a  rare  plaintiveness  and  gentleness, 
but  in  both  absolutely  sincere.  Addison  is  gay 
and  witty  and  delightful  but  he  only  plays  at 
being  human;  Lamb's  essays — the  translation 
into  print  of  a  heap  of  idiosyncrasies  and  oddi- 
ties, and  likes  and  dislikes,  and  strange  humours 
— come  straight  and  lovably  from  a  human 
soul. 

The  prose  writers  of  the  romantic  movement 
brought  back  two  things  into  writing  which  had 
been  out  of  it  since  the  seventeenth  century. 
They  brought  back  egotism  and  they  brought 
back  enthusiasm.  They  had  the  confidence  that 
their  own  tastes  and  experiences  were  enough 
to  interest  their  readers;  they  mastered  the  gift 
of  putting  themselves  on  paper.  But  there 
is  one  wide  difference  between  them  and  their 
predecessors.  Robert  Burton  was  an  egotist 
but  he  was  an  unconscious  one;  the  same  is, 
perhaps,  true  though  much  less  certainly  of  Sir 
Thomas  Browne.  In  Lamb  and  Hazlitt  and 
De  Quincey  egotism  was  deliberate,  consciously 
assumed,  the  result  of  a  compelling  and  shap- 
ing art.  If  one  reads  Lamb's  earlier  essays  and 
prose  pieces  one  can  see  the  process  at  work — 
watch  him  consciously  imitating  Fuller,  or  Burton, 


188    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

or  Browne,  mirroring  their  idiosyncrasies,  mak- 
ing their  quaintness  and  graces  his  own.  By 
the  time  he  came  to  write  the  Essays  of  Elia, 
he  had  mastered  the  personal  style  so  com- 
pletely that  his  essays  seem  simply  the  overflow 
of  talk.  They  are  so  desultory;  they  move  from 
one  subject  to  another  so  waywardly — such  an 
essay  as  a  Chapter  on  Ears,  for  instance,  passing 
with  the  easy  inconsequence  of  conversation 
from  anatomy  through  organ  music  to  beer — 
when  they  quote,  as  they  do  constantly,  it  is 
incorrectly,  as  in  the  random  reminiscences  of 
talk.  Here  one  would  say  is  the  cream  risen  to 
the  surface  of  a  full  mind  and  skimmed  at  one 
taking.  How  far  all  this  is  from  the  truth  we 
know — know,  too,  how  for  months  he  polished 
and  rewrote  these  magazine  articles,  rubbing 
away  roughnesses  and  corners,  taking  off  the 
traces  of  logical  sequences  and  argument,  till 
in  the  finished  work  of  art  he  mimicked  in- 
consequence so  perfectly  that  his  friends  might 
have  been  deceived.  And  the  personality  he 
put  on  paper  was  partly  an  artistic  creation, 
too.  In  life  Lamb  was  a  nervous,  easily  excit- 
able and  emotional  man;  his  years  were  worn 
with  the  memory  of  a  great  tragedy  and  the 
constantly  impending  fear  of  a  repetition  of  it. 
One  must  assume  him  in  his  way  to  have  been 
a  good  man  of  business — he  was  a  clerk  in  the 
India  House,  then  a  throbbing  centre  of  trade, 
and  the  largest  commercial  concern  in  England, 
and  when  he  retired  his  employers  gave  him 
a  very  handsome  pension.  In  the  early  por- 
trait by  HazKtt  there  is  a  dark  and  gleaming 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL        189 

look  of  fire  and  decision.  But  you  would  never 
guess  it  from  his  books.  There  he  is  the  gentle 
recluse,  dreaming  over  old  books,  old  furniture, 
old  prints,  old  plays  and  playbills;  living  always 
in  the  past,  loving  in  the  town  secluded  byways 
like  the  Temple,  or  the  libraries  of  Oxford  Col- 
leges, and  in  the  country  quiet  and  shaded  lanes, 
none  of  the  age's  enthusiasm  for  mountains  in 
his  soul.  When  he  turned  critic  it  was  not  to 
discern  and  praise  the  power  and  beauty  in  the 
works  of  his  contemporaries  but  to  rediscover 
and  interpret  the  Elizabethan  and  Jacobean  ro- 
mantic plays. 

This  quality  of  egotism  Lamb  shares  with 
other  writers  of  the  time,  with  De  Quincey,  for 
instance,  who  left  buried  in  work  which  is  exten- 
sive and  unequal,  much  that  lives  by  virtue  of 
the  singular  elaborateness  and  loftiness  of  the 
style  which  he  could  on  occasion  command.  For 
the  revival  of  enthusiasm  one  must  turn  to  Haz- 
litt,  who  brought  his  passionate  and  combative 
disposition  to  the  service  of  criticism,  and  pro- 
duced a  series  of  studies  remarkable  for  their 
earnestness  and  their  vigour,  and  for  the  essential 
justness  which  they  display  despite  the  prejudice 
on  which  each  of  them  was  confessedly  based. 


190    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 
CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  VICTORIAN  AGE 

(1) 

Had  it  not  been  that  with  two  exceptions  all 
the  poets  of  the  Romantic  Revival  died  early, 
it  might  be  more  difficult  to  draw  a  line  between 
their  school  and  that  of  their  successors  than  it 
is.  As  it  happened,  the  only  poet  who  survived 
and  wrote  was  Wordsworth,  the  oldest  of  them 
all.  For  long  before  his  death  he  did  nothing 
that  had  one  touch  of  the  fire  and  beauty  of  his 
earlier  work.  The  respect  he  began,  after  a 
lifetime  of  neglect,  to  receive  in  the  years  im- 
mediately before  his  death,  was  paid  not  to  the 
conservative  laureate  of  1848,  but  to  the  revolu- 
tionary in  art  and  politics  of  fifty  years  before. 
He  had  lived  on  long  after  his  work  was  done 

"To  hear  the  world  applaud  the  hollow  ghost 
That  blamed  the  living  man." 

All  the  others,  Keats,  Shelley,  Byron  were  dead 
before  1830,  and  the  problem  which  might  have 
confronted  us  had  they  lived,  of  adult  work 
running  counter  to  the  tendencies  and  ideals  of 
youth,  does  not  exist  for  us.  Keats  or  Shelley 
might  have  lived  as  long  as  Carlyle,  with  whom 
they  were  almost  exactly  contemporary ;  had  they 
done  so,  the  age  of  the  Romantic  Revival  and  the 
Victorian  age  would  have  been  united  in  the  lives 
of  authors  who  were  working  in  both.    We  should 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  191 

conceive  that  is,  the  whole  period  as  one,  just  as 
we  conceive  of  the  Renaissance  in  England,  from 
Surrey  to  Shirley,  as  one.  As  it  is,  we  have  ac- 
customed ourselves  to  a  strongly  marked  line  of 
division.  A  man  must  be  on  either  one  side  or  the 
other;  Wordsworth,  though  he  wrote  on  till  1850, 
is  on  the  further  side,  Carlyle,  though  he  was 
born  in  the  same  year  as  Keats,  on  the  hither  side. 
Still  the  accident  of  length  of  days  must  not 
blind  us  to  the  fact  that  the  Victorian  period, 
though  in  many  respects  its  ideals  and  modes  of 
thinking  differed  from  those  of  the  period  which 
preceded  it,  is  essentially  an  extension  of  the 
Romantic  Revival  and  not  a  fresh  start.  The 
coherent  inspiration  of  romanticism  disintegrated 
into  separate  lines  of  development,  just  as  in 
the  seventeenth  century  the  single  inspiration  of 
the  Renaissance  broke  into  different  schools. 
Along  these  separate  lines  represented  by  such 
men  as  Browning,  the  Pre-Raphaelites,  Arnold, 
and  Meredith,  literature  enriched  and  elaborated 
itself  into  fresh  forms.  None  the  less,  every 
author  in  each  of  these  lines  of  literary  activ- 
ity invites  his  readers  to  understand  his  direct 
relations  to  the  romantic  movement.  Rossetti 
touches  it  through  his  original,  Keats;  Arnold 
through  Goethe  and  Byron;  Browning  first 
through  Shelley  and  then  in  item  after  item  of 
his  varied  subject-matter. 

In  one  direction  the  Victorian  age  achieved 
a  salient  and  momentous  advance.  The  Roman- 
tic Revival  had  been  interested  in  nature,  in 
the  past,  and  in  a  lesser  degree  in  art,  but  it 
had  not  been  interested   in  men  and  women. 


192    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

To  Wordsworth  the  dalesmen  of  the  lakes  were 
part  of  the  scenery  they  moved  in;  he  saw  men 
as  trees  walking,  and  when  he  writes  about 
them  as  in  such  great  poems  as  Resolution  and 
Independence,  the  Brothers,  or  Michael,  it  is  as 
natural  objects  he  treats  them,  invested  with 
the  lonely  remoteness  that  separates  them  from 
the  complexities  and  passions  of  life  as  it  is 
lived.  They  are  there,  you  feel,  to  teach  the 
same  lesson  as  the  landscape  teaches  in  which 
they  are  set.  The  passing  of  the  old  Cumber- 
land beggar  through  villages  and  past  farm- 
steads, brings  to  those  who  see  him  the  same 
kind  of  consolation  as  the  impulses  from  a  ver- 
nal wood  that  Wordsworth  celebrated  in  his 
purely  nature  poetry.  Compare  with  Words- 
worth, Browning,  and  note  the  fundamental 
change  in  the  attitude  of  the  poet  that  his  work 
reveals.  Pippa  Passes  is  a  poem  on  exactly  the 
same  scheme  as  the  Old  Cumberland  Beggar, 
but  in  treatment  no  two  things  could  be  further 
apart.  The  intervention  of  Pippa  is  dramatic,  and 
though  her  song  is  in  the  same  key  as  the  word- 
less message  of  Wordsworth's  beggar  she  is  a 
world  apart  from  him,  because  she  is  some- 
thing not  out  of  natural  history,  but  out  of  life. 
The  Victorian  age  extended  the  imaginative 
sensibility  which  its  predecessor  had  brought 
to  bear  on  nature  and  history,  to  the  com- 
plexities of  human  life.  It  searched  for  indi- 
viduality in  character,  studied  it  with  a  loving 
minuteness,  and  built  up  out  of  its  discoveries 
amongst  men  and  women  a  body  of  literature 
which  in  its  very  mode  of  conception  was  more 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  19S 

closely  related  to  life,  and  thus  the  object  of 
greater  interest  and  excitement  to  its  readers, 
than  anything  which  had  been  written  In  the 
previous  ages.  It  is  the  direct  result  of  this 
extension  of  romanticism  that  the  novel  became 
the  characteristic  means  of  literary  expression 
of  the  time,  and  that  Browning,  the  poet  who 
more  than  all  others  represents  the  essential 
spirit  of  his  age,  should  have  been  as  it  were, 
a  novelist  in  verse.  Only  one  other  literary 
form,  indeed,  could  have  ministered  adequately 
to  this  awakened  interest,  but  by  some  luck 
not  easy  to  understand,  the  drama,  which  might 
have  done  with  greater  economy  and  directness 
the  work  the  novel  had  to  do,  remained  outside 
the  main  stream  of  literary  activity.  To  the 
drama  at  last  it  would  seem  that  we  are  return- 
ing, and  it  may  be  that  in  the  future  the  direct 
representation  of  the  clash  of  human  life  which 
is  still  mainly  in  the  hands  of  our  novelists,  may 
come  back  to  its  own  domain. 

The  Victorian  age  then  added  humanity  to 
nature  and  art  as  the  subject-matter  of  literature. 
But  it  went  further  than  that.  For  the  first 
time  since  the  Renaissance,  came  an  era  which 
was  conscious  of  itself  as  an  epoch  in  the  history 
of  mankind,  and  confident  of  its  mission.  The 
fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries  revolutionized 
cosmography,  and  altered  the  face  of  the  physical 
world.  The  nineteenth  century,  by  the  discov- 
eries of  its  men  of  science,  and  by  the  remark- 
able and  rapid  succession  of  inventions  which 
revolutionized  the  outward  face  of  life,  made 
hardly  less  alteration  in  accepted  ways  of  think- 


194    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

ing.  The  evolutionary  theory,  which  had  been  in 
the  air  since  Goethe,  and  to  which  Darwin  was 
able  to  give  an  incontrovertible  basis  of  scien- 
tific fact,  profoundly  influenced  man's  attitude 
to  nature  and  to  religion.  Physical  as  apart  from 
natural  science  made  scarcely  less  advance, 
and  instead  of  a  world  created  in  some  fixed 
moment  of  time,  on  which  had  been  placed  by 
some  outward  agency  all  the  forms  and  shapes 
of  nature  that  we  know,  came  the  conception  of 
a  planet  congealing  out  of  a  nebula,  and  of  some 
lower,  simpler  and  primeval  form  of  life  multi- 
plying and  diversifying  itself  through  succeeding 
stages  of  development  to  form  both  the  animal 
and  the  vegetable  world.  This  conception  not 
only  enormously  excited  and  stimulated  thought, 
but  it  gave  thinkers  a  strange  sense  of  confidence 
and  certainty  not  possessed  by  the  age  before. 
Everything  seemed  plain  to  them;  they  were 
heirs  of  all  the  ages.  Their  doubts  were  as  certain 
as  their  faith. 

"There  lives  more  faith  in  honest  doubt 
Believe  me  than  in  half  the  creeds." 

-said  Tennyson;  "honest  doubt,"  hugged  with 
all  the  certainty  of  a  revelation,  is  the  creed  of 
most  of  his  philosophical  poetry,  and  what  is  more 
to  the  point  was  the  creed  of  the  masses  that 
were  beginning  to  think  for  themselves,  to  whose 
awakening  interest  his  work  so  strongly  appealed. 
There  were  no  doubt,  literary  side-currents. 
Disraeli  survived  to  show  that  there  were  still 
young  men  who  thought  Byronically.  Rossetti 
and  his  school  held  themselves  proudly  aloof  from 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  195 

the  rationalistic  and  scientific  tendencies  of  the 
time,  and  found  in  the  Middle  ages,  better  under- 
stood than  they  had  been  either  by  Coleridge 
or  Scott,  a  refuge  from  a  time  of  factories  and 
fact.  The  Oxford  movement  ministered  to  the 
same  tendencies  in  religion  and  philosophy;  but 
it  is  the  scientific  spirit,  and  all  that  the  scien- 
tific spirit  implied,  its  certain  doubt,  its  care  for 
minuteness,  and  truth  of  observation,  its  growing 
interest  in  social  processes,  and  the  conditions 
under  which  life  is  lived,  that  is  the  central 
fact  in  Victorian  literature. 

Tennyson  represents  more  fully  than  any 
other  poet  this  essential  spirit  of  the  age.  Ji 
it  be  true,  as  has  been  often  asserted,  that  the 
spirit  of  an  age  is  to  be  found  best  in  the  work 
of  lesser  men,  his  complete  identity  with  the 
thought  of  his  time  is  in  itself  evidence  of 
his  inferiority  to  his  contemporary,  Browning. 
Comparisons  between  the  two  men  seem  inevit- 
able; they  were  made  by  readers  when  In  Me- 
moriam  and  Men  and  Women  came  hot  from  the 
press,  and  they  have  been  made  ever  since.  There 
could,  of  course,  scarcely  be  two  men  more 
dissimilar,  Tennyson  elaborating  and  decorating 
the  obvious;  Browning  delving  into  the  esoteric 
and  the  obscure,  and  bringing  up  strange  and 
unfamiliar  finds;  Tennyson  in  faultless  verse  reg- 
istering current  newly  accepted  ways  of  thought; 
Browning  in  advance  thinking  afresh  for  him- 
self, occupied  ceaselessly  in  the  arduous  labour 
of  creating  an  audience  fit  to  judge  him.  The 
age  justified  the  accuracy  with  which  Tenny- 
son mirrored  it,  by  accepting  him  and  rejecting 


196    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

Browning.  It  is  this  very  accuracy  that  almost 
forces  us  at  this  time  to  minimise  and  dispraise 
Tennyson's  work.  We  have  passed  from  Victorian 
certainties,  and  so  he  is  apt  when  he  writes  in 
the  mood  of  Locksley  Hall  and  the  rest,  to  appear 
to  us  a  little  shallow,  a  little  empty,  and  a  little 
pretentious. 

His  earlier  poetry,  before  he  took  upon  him- 
self the  burden  of  the  age,  is  his  best  work,  and 
it  bears  strongly  marked  upon  it  the  influence 
of  Keats.  Such  a  poem  for  instance  as  (Enone 
shows  an  extraordinarily  fine  sense  of  language 
and  melody,  and  the  capacity  caught  from 
Keats  of  conveying  a  rich  and  highly  coloured 
pictorial  effect.  No  other  poet,  save  Keats, 
has  had  a  sense  of  colour  so  highly  developed 
as  Tennyson's.  From  his  boyhood  he  was  an 
exceedingly  close  and  sympathetic  observer  of 
the  outward  forms  of  nature,  and  he  makes  a 
splendid  use  of  what  his  eyes  had  taught  him 
in  these  earlier  poems.  Later  his  interest  in 
insects  and  birds  and  flowers  outran  the  legiti- 
mate opportunity  he  possessed  of  using  it  in 
poetry.  It  was  his  habit,  his  son  tells  us,  to 
keep  notebooks  of  things  he  had  observed  in 
his  garden  or  in  his  walks,  and  to  work  them 
up  afterwards  into  similes  for  the  Princess  and 
the  Idylls  of  the  King.  Read  in  the  books  written 
by  admirers,  in  which  they  have  been  studied 
and  collected  (there  are  several  of  them)  these 
similes  are  pleasing  enough;  in  the  text  where 
they  stand  they  are  apt  to  have  the  air  of  im- 
pertinences, beautiful  and  extravagant  imperti- 
nences no  doubt,  but  alien  to  their  setting.     In 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  197 

one  of  the  Idylls  of  the  King  the  fall  of  a  drunken 
knight  from  his  horse  is  compared  to  the  fall  of 
a  jutting  edge  of  cliff  and  with  it  a  lance-like 
fir-tree,  which  Tennyson  had  observed  near 
his  home,  and  one  cannot  resist  the  feeling 
that  the  comparison  is  a  thought  too  great  for 
the  thing  it  was  meant  to  illustrate.  So,  too, 
in  the  Princess  when  he  describes  a  handwriting, 

"In  such  a  hand  as  when  a  field  of  com 
Bows  all  its  ears  before  the  roaring  East." 

he  is  using  up  a  sight  noted  in  his  walks  and 
transmuted  into  poetry  on  a  trivial  and  frivolous 
occasion.  You  do  not  feel,  in  fact,  that  the 
handwriting  visualized  spontaneously  called  up 
the  comparison;  you  are  as  good  as  certain 
that  the  simile  existed  waiting  for  use  before 
the  handwriting  was  thought  of. 

The  accuracy  of  his  observation  of  nature, 
his  love  of  birds  and  larvae  is  matched  by  the 
carefulness  'wdth  which  he  embodies,  as  soon 
as  ever  they  were  made,  the  discoveries  of  natural 
and  physical  science.  Nowadays,  possibly  because 
these  things  have  become  commonplace  to  us, 
we  may  find  him  a  little  school-boy-like  in  his 
pride  of  knowledge.    He  knows  that 

"This  world  was  once  a  fluid  haze  of  light. 
Till  toward  the  centre  set  the  starry  tides 
And  eddied  wild  suns  that  wheeling  cast 
The  planets." 

just  as  he  knows  what  the  catkins  on  the  wil- 
lows are  like,  or  the  names  of  the  butterflies: 


198    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

but  he  is  capable,  on  occasion  of  "dragging  it 
in,"  as  in 

"The  nebulous  star  we  call  the  sun. 
If  that  hypothesis  of  theirs  be  sound." 

from  the  mere  pride  in  his  familiarity  with  the 
last  new  thing.  His  dealings  with  science,  that 
is,  no  more  than  his  dealings  with  nature,  have 
that  inevitableness,  that  spontaneous  appropriate- 
ness that  we  feel  we  have  a  right  to  ask  from 
great  poetry. 

Had  Edgar  Allan  Poe  wanted  an  example  for 
his  theory  of  the  impossibility  of  writing,  in 
modern  times,  a  long  poem,  he  might  have 
found  it  in  Tennyson.  His  strength  is  in  his 
shorter  pieces;  even  where  as  in  In  Memoriam 
he  has  conceived  and  written  something  at  once 
extended  and  beautiful,  the  beauty  lies  rather 
in  the  separate  parts;  the  thing  is  more  in  the 
nature  of  a  sonnet  sequence  than  a  continuous 
poem.  Of  his  other  larger  works,  the  Princess, 
a  scarcely  happy  blend  between  burlesque  in 
the  manner  of  the  Rape  of  the  Lock,  and  a  serious 
apostleship  of  the  liberation  of  women,  is  solely 
redeemed  by  these  lyrics.  Tennyson's  innate 
conservatism  hardly  squared  with  the  liberalis- 
ing tendencies  he  caught  from  the  more  advanced 
thought  of  his  age,  in  writing  it.  Something  of 
the  same  kind  is  true  of  Maud,  which  is  a  novel 
told  in  dramatically  varied  verse.  The  hero  is 
morbid,  his  social  satire  peevish,  and  a  story 
which  could  have  been  completely  redeemed 
by  the  ending  (the  death  of  the  hero),  which 
artistic  fitness  demands,  is  of  value  for  us  now 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  199 

through  its  three  amazing  songs,  in  which  the 
lyric  genius  of  Tennyson  reached  its  finest  flower. 
It  cannot  be  denied,  either,  that  he  failed — 
though  magnificently — in  the  Idylls  of  the  King. 
The  odds  were  heavily  against  him  in  the  choice 
of  a  subject.  Arthur  is  at  once  too  legendary  and 
too  shadowy  for  an  epic  hero,  and  nothing  but 
the  treatment  that  Milton  gave  to  Satan  (i.e.  flat 
substitution  of  the  legendary  person  by  a  newly 
created  character)  could  fit  him  for  the  place. 
Even  if  Arthur  had  been  more  promising  than 
he  is,  Tennyson's  sympathies  were  fundamentally 
alien  from  the  moral  and  religious  atmosphere 
of  Arthurian  romance.  His  robust  Protestant- 
ism left  no  room  for  mysticism;  he  could  neither 
appreciate  nor  render  the  mystical  fervour  and 
exultation  which  is  in  the  old  history  of  the 
Holy  Grail.  Nor  could  he  comprehend  the 
morality  of  a  society  where  courage,  sympathy 
for  the  oppressed,  loyalty  and  courtesy  were 
the  only  essential  virtues,  and  love  took  the  way 
of  freedom  and  the  heart  rather  than  the  way 
of  law.  In  his  heart  Tennyson's  attitude  to  the 
ideals  of  chivalry  and  the  old  stories  in  which 
they  are  embodied  differed  probably  very  little 
from  that  of  Roger  Ascham,  or  of  any  other 
Protestant  Englishman;  when  he  endeavoured 
to  make  an  epic  of  them  and  to  fasten  to  it  an 
allegory  in  which  Arthur  should  typify  the  war 
of  soul  against  sense,  what  happened  was  only 
what  might  have  been  expected.  The  heroic 
enterprise  failed,  and  left  us  with  a  series  of  mid- 
Victorian  novels  in  verse  in  which  the  knights 
figure  as  heroes  of  the  generic  mid- Victorian  type. 


200    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

But  if  he  failed  in  his  larger  poems,  he  had 
a  genius  little  short  of  perfect  in  his  handling 
of  shorter  forms.  The  Arthurian  story  which 
produced  only  middling  moralizing  in  the  Idylls, 
gave  us  as  well  the  supremely  written  Homeric 
episode  of  the  Morte  d'Arthur,  and  the  sharp 
and  defined  beauty  of  Sir  Galahad  and  the  Lady 
of  Shalott.  Tennyson  had  a  touch  of  the  pre- 
Raphaelite  faculty  of  minute  painting  in  words, 
and  the  writing  of  these  poems  is  as  clear  and 
naive  as  in  the  best  things  of  Rossetti.  He  had 
also  what  neither  Rossetti  nor  any  of  his  contem- 
poraries in  verse,  except  Browning,  had,  a  fine 
gift  of  understanding  humanity.  The  peasants 
of  his  English  idylls  are  conceived  with  as  much 
breadth  of  sympathy  and  richness  of  humour,  as 
purely  and  as  surely,  as  the  peasants  of  Chaucer 
or  Burns.  A  note  of  passionate  humanity  is  in- 
deed in  all  his  work.  It  makes  vivid  and  intense 
his  scholarly  handling  of  Greek  myth;  always 
the  unchanging  human  aspect  of  it  attracts 
him  most,  in  (Enone's  grief,  in  the  indomitable- 
ness  of  Ulysses,  the  weariness  and  disillusion- 
ment in  Tithonus.  It  has  been  the  cause  of  the 
comfort  he  has  brought  to  sorrow;  none  of  his 
generation  takes  such  a  human  attitude  to  death. 
Shelley  could  yearn  for  the  infinite,  Browning 
treat  it  as  the  last  and  greatest  adventure,  Arnold 
meet  it  clear  eyed  and  resigned,  To  Wordsworth 
it  is  the  mere  return  of  man  the  transient  to 
Nature  the  eternal. 

"No  motion  has  she  now;  no  force. 
She  neither  hears  nor  sees. 
Rolled  round  in  earth's  unending  course 
With  rocks  and  fields  and  trees." 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  201 

To  Tennyson  it  brings  the  fundamental  human 
home-sickness  for  familiar  things. 

"Ah,  sad  and  strange  as  on  dark  summer  dawns. 
The  earliest  pipe  of  half-awakened  birds 
To  dying  ears  when  unto  dying  eyes 
The  casement  slowly  grows  a  glimmering  square." 

It  is  an  accent  which  wakes  an  echo  in  a  thousand 
hearts. 

(2) 

While  Tennyson,  in  his  own  special  way  and, 
so  to  speak,  in  collaboration  with  the  spirit  of 
the  age,  was  carrying  on  the  work  of  Romanticism 
on  its  normal  lines,  Browning  was  finding  a  new 
style  and  a  new  subject  matter.  In  his  youth 
he  had  begun  as  an  imitator  of  Shelley,  and 
Pauline  and  Paracelsus  remain  to  show  what  the 
influence  of  the  "sun-treader  "  was  on  his  poetry. 
But  as  early  as  his  second  publication.  Bells 
and  Pomegranates,  he  had  begun  to  speak  for 
himself,  and  with  Men  and  Women,  a  series  of 
poems  of  amazing  variety  and  brilliance,  he 
placed  himself  unassailably  in  the  first  rank. 
Like  Tennyson's,  his  genius  continued  high  and 
undimraed  while  life  was  left  him.  Men  and 
Women  was  followed  by  an  extraordinary  nar- 
rative poem,  The  Ring  and  the  Book,  and  it  by 
several  volumes  of  scarcely  less  brilliance,  the 
last  of  which  appeared  on  the  very  day  of  his 
death. 

Of  the  two  classes  into  which,  as  we  saw  when 
we  were  studying  Burns,  creative  artists  can 
be  divided.  Browning  belongs  to  that  one  which 


202    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

makes  everything  new  for  itself,  and  has  in  con- 
sequence to  educate  the  readers  by  whom  its 
work  can  alone  be  judged.  He  was  an  innovator 
in  nearly  everything  he  did;  he  thought  for  him- 
self; he  wrote  for  himself,  and  in  his  own  way. 
And  because  he  refused  to  follow  ordinary  modes 
of  writing,  he  was  and  is  still  widely  credited  with 
being  tortured  and  obscure.^  The  charge  of 
obscurity  is  unfortunate  because  it  tends  to  shut 
off  from  him  a  large  class  of  readers  for  whom  he 
has  a  sane  and  special  and  splendid  message. 

His  most  important  innovation  in  form  was 
his  device  of  the  dramatic  lyric.  What  interested 
him  in  life  was  men  and  women,  and  in  them,  not 
their  actions,  but  the  motives  which  governed 
their  actions.  To  lay  bare  fully  the  working 
of  motive  in  a  narrative  form  with  himself  as 
narrator  was  obviously  impossible;  the  strict 
dramatic  form,  though  he  attained  some  success 
in  it,  does  not  seem  to  have  attracted  him,  prob- 
ably because  in  it  the  ultimate  stress  must  be  on 
the  thing  done  rather  than  the  thing  thought; 
there  remained,  therefore,  of  the  ancient  forms 
of  poetry,  the  lyric.  The  lyric  had  of  course 
been  used  before  to  express  emotions  imagined 
and  not   real   to   the  poet   himself;    Browning 

^  The  deeper  causes  of  Browning's  obscurity  have  been 
detailed  in  Chapter  iv.  of  this  book.  It  may  be  added  for  the 
benefit  of  the  reader  who  fights  shy  on  the  report  of  it,  that 
in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  it  arises  simply  from  his  colloquial 
method;  we  go  to  him  expecting  the  smoothness  and  com- 
pleteness of  Tennyson;  we  find  in  him  the  irregularities,  the 
suppressions,  the  quick  changes  of  talk — the  clipped,  clever 
talk  of  much  idea'd  people  who  hurry  breathlessly  from  one 
aspect  to  another  of  a  subject. 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  203 

was  the  first  to  project  it  to  express  imagined 
emotions  of  men  and  women,  whether  typical 
or  individual,  whom  he  himself  had  created. 
Alongside  this  perversion  of  the  lyric,  he  created 
a  looser  and  freer  form,  the  dramatic  monologue, 
in  which  most  of  his  most  famous  poems,  CleoUy 
Sludge  the  Medium,  Bishop  Blougram's  Apology^ 
etc.,  are  cast.  In  the  convention  which  Browning 
established  in  it,  all  kinds  of  people  are  endowed 
with  a  miraculous  articulation,  a  new  gift  of 
tongues;  they  explain  themselves,  their  motives, 
the  springs  of  those  motives  (for  in  Browning's 
view  every  thought  and  act  of  a  man's  life  is 
part  of  an  interdependent  whole),  and  their 
author's  peculiar  and  robust  philosophy  of  life. 
Out  of  the  dramatic  monologues  he  devised  the 
scheme  of  The  Ring  and  the  Book,  a  narrative 
poem  in  which  the  episodes,  and  not  the  plot, 
are  the  basis  of  the  structure,  and  the  story  of 
a  trifling  and  sordid  crime  is  set  forth  as  it  ap- 
peared to  the  minds  of  the  chief  actors  in  succes- 
sion. To  these  new  forms  he  added  the  originality 
of  an  extraordinary  realism  in  style.  Few  poets 
have  the  power  by  a  word,  a  phrase,  a  flash 
of  observation  in  detail  to  make  you  see  the 
event  as  Browning  makes  you  see  it. 

Many  books  have  been  written  on  the  phi- 
losophy of  Browning's  poetry.  Stated  briefly  its 
message  is  that  of  an  optimism  which  depends  on 
a  recognition  of  the  strenuousness  of  life.  The 
base  of  his  creed,  as  of  Carlyle's,  is  the  gospel 
of  labour;  he  believes  in  the  supreme  moral  worth 
of  effort.  Life  is  a  "training  school"  for  a  future 
existence,  and  our  place  in  it  depends  on  the 


204    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

courage  and  strenuousness  with  which  we  have 
laboured  here.  Evil  is  in  the  world  only  as  an 
instrument  in  the  process  of  development;  by 
conquering  it  we  exercise  our  spiritual  faculties 
the  more.  Only  torpor  is  the  supreme  sin,  even 
as  in  The  Statue  and  the  Bust  where  effort  would 
have  been  to  a  criminal  end. 

"  The  counter  our  lovers  staked  was  lost 
As  surely  as  if  it  were  lawful  coin: 
And  the  sin  I  impute  to  each  frustrate  ghost 
Was,  the  imlit  lamp  and  the  ungirt  loin. 
Though  the  end  in  sight  was  a  crime,  I  say." 

All  the  other  main  ideas  of  his  poetry  fit  with 
perfect  consistency  on  to  his  scheme.  Love,  the 
manifestation  of  a  man's  or  a  woman's  nature, 
is  the  highest  and  most  intimate  relationship 
possible,  for  it  is  an  opportunity — the  highest 
opportunity — for  spiritual  growth.  It  can  reach 
this  end  though  an  actual  and  earthly  union 
is  impossible. 

"She  has  lost  me,  I  have  gained  her; 
Her  soul's  mine  and  thus  grown  perfect, 
I  shall  pass  my  life's  remainder. 
Life  will  just  hold  out  the  proving 
Both  our  powers,  alone  and  blended: 
And  then  come  the  next  life  quickly! 
This  world's  use  will  have  been  ended." 

It  follows  that  the  reward  of  effort  is  the  promise 
of  immortality,  and  that  for  each  man,  just 
because  his  thoughts  and  motives  taken  together 
count,  and  not  one  alone,  there  is  infinite  hope. 

The  contemporaries  of  Tennyson  and  Browning 
in  poetry  divide  themselves  into  three  separate 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  205 

schools.  Nearest  to  them  in  temper  is  the  school 
of  Matthew  Arnold  and  Clough;  they  have  the 
same  quick  sensitiveness  to  the  intellectual  tend- 
encies of  the  age,  but  their  foothold  in  a  time 
of  shifting  and  dissolving  creeds  is  a  stoical  resig- 
nation very  different  from  the  buoyant  optimism 
of  Browning,  or  Tennyson's  mixture  of  science  and 
doubt  and  faith.  Very  remote  from  them  on  the 
other  hand  is  the  backward-gazing  mediaevalism 
of  Rossetti  and  his  circle,  who  revived  (Rossetti 
from  Italian  sources,  Morris  from  Norman)  a 
Middle  age  which  neither  Scott  nor  Coleridge  had 
more  than  partially  and  brokenly  understood. 
The  last  school,  that  to  which  Swinburne  and 
Meredith  with  all  their  differences  unite  in  be- 
longing, gave  up  Christianity  with  scarcely  so 
much  as  a  regret, 

"We  have  said  to  the  dream  that  caress'd  and  the  dread  that 
smote  us, 
Grood-night  and  good-bye." 

and  turned  with  a  new  hope  and  exultation  to 
the  worship  of  our  immemorial  mother  the  earth. 
In  both  of  them,  the  note  of  enthusiasm  for 
political  liberty  which  had  been  lost  in  Words- 
worth after  1815,  and  was  too  early  extinguished 
with  Shelley,  was  revived  by  the  Italian  Revolu- 
tion in  splendour  and  fire. 


(3) 

As  one  gets  nearer  one's  own  time,  a  certain 
change  comes  insensibly  over  one's  literary 
studies.     Literature  comes  more  and  more  to 


206    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

mean  imaginative  literature  or  writing  about 
imaginative  literature.  The  mass  of  writing 
comes  to  be  taken  not  as  literature,  but  as  ar- 
gument or  information;  we  consider  it  purely 
from  the  point  of  view  of  its  subject  matter.  A 
comparison  will  make  this  at  once  clear.  When 
a  man  reads  Bacon,  he  commonly  regards  him- 
self as  engaged  in  the  study  of  English  literature; 
when  he  reads  Darwin  he  is  occupied  in  the  study 
of  natural  science.  A  reader  of  Bacon's  time 
would  have  looked  on  him  as  we  look  on  Darwin 
now. 

The  distinction  is  obviously  illogical,  but  a 
writer  on  English  Uterature  within  brief  limits 
is  forced  to  bow  to  it  if  he  wishes  his  book  to 
avoid  the  dreariness  of  a  summary,  and  he  can 
plead  in  extenuation  the  increased  literary  out- 
put of  the  later  age,  and  the  incompleteness 
with  which  time  so  far  has  done  its  work  in  sifting 
the  memorable  from  the  forgettable,  the  ephem- 
eral from  what  is  going  to  last.  The  main  body 
of  imaginative  prose  literature — the  novel — is 
treated  of  in  the  next  chapter  and  here  no 
attempt  will  be  made  to  deal  with  any  but  the 
admittedly  greatest  names.  Nothing  can  be  said, 
for  instance,  of  that  fluent  journalist  and  biassed 
historian  Macaulay,  nor  of  the  raellifluousness 
of  Newman,  nor  of  the  vigour  of  Kingsley  or 
Maurice;  nor  of  the  writings,  admirable  in  their 
literary  qualities  of  purity  and  terseness,  of  Dar- 
win or  Huxley;  nor  of  the  culture  and  apostleship 
of  Matthew  Arnold.  These  authors,  one  and  all, 
interpose  no  barrier,  so  to  speak,  between  their 
subject-matter  and  their  readers;    you  are  not 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  207 

when  you  read  them  conscious  of  a  literary  inten- 
tion, but  of  some  utiUtarian  one,  and  as  an  essay 
on  English  literature  is  by  no  means  a  hand- 
book to  serious  reading  they  will  be  no  more 
mentioned  here. 

In  the  case  of  one  nineteenth  century  writer 
in  prose,  this  method  of  exclusion  cannot  apply. 
Both  Carlyle  and  Ruskin  were  professional  men 
of  letters;  both  in  the  voluminous  compass  of 
their  works  touched  on  a  large  variety  of  subjects; 
both  wrote  highly  individual  and  peculiar  styles; 
and  both  without  being  either  professional  phi- 
losophers or  professional  preachers,  were  as  every 
good  man  of  letters,  whether  he  denies  it  or  not, 
is  and  must  be,  lay  morahsts  and  prophets.  Of 
the  two,  Ruskin  is  plain  and  easily  read,  and 
he  derives  his  message;  Carlyle,  his  original, 
is  apt  to  be  tortured  and  obscure.  Inside  the 
body  of  his  work  the  student  of  nineteenth  cen- 
tury literature  is  probably  in  need  of  some  guid- 
ance; outside  so  far  as  prose  is  concerned  he  can 
fend  for  himself. 

As  we  saw,  Carlyle  was  the  oldest  of  the 
Victorians;  he  was  over  forty  when  the  Queen 
came  to  the  throne.  Already  his  years  of  prep- 
aration in  Scotland,  town  and  country,  were 
over,  and  he  had  settled  in  that  famous  little 
house  in  Chelsea  which  for  nearly  half  a  century 
to  come  was  to  be  one  of  the  central  hearths  of 
literary  London.  More  than  that,  he  had  already 
fully  formed  his  mode  of  thought  and  his  peculiar 
style.  Sartor  Resartus  was  written  and  published 
serially  before  the  Queen  came  to  the  throne; 
the  French  Revolution  came  in  the  year  of  her 


208    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

accession  at  the  very  time  that  Carlyle's  lectures 
were  making  him  a  fashionable  sensation;  most 
of  his  miscellaneous  essays  had  already  appeared 
in  the  reviews.  But  with  the  strict  Victorian 
era,  as  if  to  justify  the  usually  arbitrary  division 
of  literary  history  by  dynastic  periods,  there  came 
a  new  spirit  into  his  work.  For  the  first  time  he 
applied  his  peculiar  system  of  ideas  to  contempo- 
rary politics.  Chartism  appeared  in  1839;  Past 
and  Present,  which  does  the  same  thing  as  Char- 
tism in  an  artistic  form,  three  years  later.  They 
were  followed  by  one  other  book — Latter  Day 
Pamphlets — addressed  particularly  to  contempo- 
rary conditions,  and  by  two  remarkable  and  volu- 
minous historical  works.  Then  came  the  death 
of  his  wife,  and  for  the  last  fifteen  years  of  his 
life  silence,  broken  only  briefly  and  at  rare 
intervals. 

The  reader  who  comes  to  Carlyle  with  pre- 
conceived notions  based  on  what  he  has  heard 
of  the  subject-matter  of  his  books  is  certain  to 
be  surprised  by  what  he  finds.  There  are  his- 
tories in  the  canon  of  his  works  and  pamphlets 
on  contemporary  problems,  but  they  are  com- 
posed on  a  plan  that  no  other  historian  and 
no  other  social  reformer  would  own.  A  reader 
will  find  in  them  no  argument,  next  to  no  rea- 
soning, and  little  practical  judgment.  Carlyle 
was  not  a  great  "thinker"  in  the  strictest  sense 
of  that  term.  He  was  under  the  control,  not 
of  his  reason,  but  of  his  emotions;  deep  feeling, 
a  volcanic  intensity  of  temperament  flaming 
into  the  light  and  heat  of  prophecy,  invective, 
derision,  or  a  simple  splendour  of  eloquence,  is 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  209 

the  characteristic  of  his  work.  Against  cold- 
blooded argument  his  p^sionate  nature  rose 
in  fierce  rebellion;  he  had  no  patience  with 
the  formaUst  or  the  doctrinaire.  Nor  had  he 
the  faculty  of  analysis;  his  historical  works 
are  a  series  of  pictures  or  tableaux,  splendidly 
and  vividly  conceived,  and  with  enormous 
colour  and  a  fine  illusion  of  reality,  but  one- 
sided as  regards  the  truth.  In  his  essays  on 
hero-worship  he  contents  himself  with  a  noisy 
reiteration  of  the  general  predicate  of  heroism; 
there  is  very  little  except  their  names  and  the 
titles  to  differentiate  one  sort  of  hero  from 
another.  His  picture  of  contemporary  condi- 
tions is  not  so  much  a  reasoned  indictment  as 
a  wild  and  fantastic  orgy  of  epithets:  "dark 
simmering  pit  of  Tophet,"  "bottomless  universal 
hypocrisies,"  and  all  the  rest.  In  it  all  he  left 
no  practical  scheme.  His  works  are  fundamentally 
not  about  pohtics  or  history  or  literature,  but 
about  himself.  They  are  the  exposition  of  a 
splendid  egotism,  fiercely  enthusiastic  about  one 
or  two  deeply  held  convictions;  their  strength 
does  not  lie  in  their  matter  of  fact. 

This  is,  perhaps,  a  condemnation  of  him  in 
the  minds  of  those  people  who  ask  of  a  social 
reformer  an  actuarially  accurate  scheme  for  the 
abolition  of  poverty,  or  from  a  prophet  a  correct 
forecast  of  the  result  of  the  next  general  election. 
Carlyle  has  little  help  for  these  and  no  message 
save  the  disconcerting  one  of  their  own  futility. 
His  message  is  at  once  larger  and  simpler,  for 
though  his  form  was  prose,  his  soul  was  a  poet's 
soul,  and  what  he  has  to  say  is  a  poet's  word. 


210    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

In  a  way,  it  is  partly  Wordsworth's  own.  The 
chief  end  of  life,  his  message  is,  is  the  performance 
of  duty,  chiefly  the  duty  of  work.  "Do  thy  little 
stroke  of  work;  this  is  Nature's  voice,  and 
the  sum  of  all  the  commandments,  to  each 
man."  All  true  work  is  religion,  all  true  work 
is  worship;  to  labour  is  to  pray.  And  after 
work,  obedience  the  best  discipline,  so  he  says 
in  Past  and  Present,  for  governing,  and  "our 
universal  duty  and  destiny;  wherein  whoso  will 
not  bend  must  break."  Carlyle  asked  of  every 
man,  action  and  obedience  and  to  bow  to  duty; 
he  [also  required  of  him  sincerity  and  veracity, 
the  duty  of  being  a  real  and  not  a  sham,  a  stren- 
uous warfare  against  cant.  The  historical  facts 
with  which  he  had  to  deal  he  grouped  under 
these  embracing  categories,  and  in  the  French 
Revolution,  which  is  as  much  a  treasure-house 
of  his  philosophy  as  a  history,  there  is  hardly 
a  page  on  which  they  do  not  appear.  "Quack- 
ridden,"  he  says,  "in  that  one  word  lies  all 
misery  whatsoever." 

These  bare  elemental  precepts  he  clothes  in 
a  garment  of  amazing  and  bizarre  richness.  There 
is  nothing  else  in  English  faintly  resembhng  the 
astonishing  eccentricity  and  individuality  of  his 
style.  Gifted  with  an  extraordinarily  excitable 
and  vivid  imagination;  seeing  things  with  sud- 
den and  tremendous  vividness,  as  in  a  search- 
light or  a  lightning  flash,  he  contrived  to  convey 
to  his  readers  his  impressions  full  charged  with 
the  original  emotion  that  produced  them,  and  thus 
with  the  highest  poetic  effect.  There  is  nothing 
in  all  descriptive  writing  to  match  the  vividness 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  211 

of  some  of  the  scenes  in  the  French  Revolution  or 
in  the  narrative  part  of  CromwelVs  Letters  and 
Speeches,  or  more  than  perhaps  in  any  of  his 
books,  because  in  it  he  was  setting  down  deep- 
seated  impressions  of  his  boyhood  rather  than 
those  got  from  brooding  over  documents,  in 
Sartor  Resartus.  Alongside  this  unmatched  pic- 
torial vividness  and  a  quite  amazing  richness 
and  rhythm  of  language,  more  surprising  and 
original  than  anything  out  of  Shakespeare,  there 
are  of  course,  striking  defects — a  wearisome  re- 
iteration of  emphasis,  a  clumsiness  of  construc- 
tion, a  saddening  fondness  for  solecisms  and 
hybrid  inventions  of  his  own.  The  reader  who  is 
interested  in  these  (and  every  one  who  reads  him 
is  forced  to  become  so)  will  find  them  faithfully 
dealt  with  in  John  Sterling's  remarkable  letter 
(quoted  in  Carlyle's  Life  of  Sterling)  on  Sartor 
Resartus.  But  gross  as  they  are,  and  frequently 
as  they  provide  matter  for  serious  offence,  these 
eccentricities  of  language  hnk  themselves  up  in 
a  strange  indissoluble  way  with  Carlyle's  indi- 
viduality and  his  power  as  an  artist.  They 
are  not  to  be  imitated,  but  he  would  be  much 
less  than  he  is  without  them,  and  they  act  by 
their  very  strength  and  pungency  as  a  pre- 
servative of  his  work.  That  of  all  the  political 
pamphlets  which  the  new  era  of  reform  occa- 
sioned, his,  which  were  the  least  in  sympathy 
with  it  and  are  the  furthest  off  the  main  stream 
of  our  political  thinking  now,  alone  continue  to  be 
read,  must  be  laid  down  not  only  to  the  prophetic 
fervour  and  fire  of  their  inspiration  but  to  the 
dark  and  violent  magic  of  their  style. 


212    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 
CHAPTER  IX 

THE  NOVEL 
(1) 

The  faculty  for  telling  stories  is  the  oldest  artis- 
tic faculty  in  the  world,  and  the  deepest  implanted 
in  the  heart  of  man.  Before  the  rudest  cave- 
pictures  were  scratched  on  the  stone,  the  storj'- 
teller,  it  is  not  unreasonable  to  suppose,  was  plying 
his  trade.  All  early  poetry  is  simply  story-telling 
in  verse.  Stories  are  the  first  literary  interest  of 
the  awakening  mind  of  a  child.  As  that  is  so, 
it  is  strange  that  the  novel,  which  of  all  literary 
ways  of  story -telling  seems  closest  to  the  unstudied 
tale-spinning  of  talk,  should  be  the  late  discovery 
that  it  is.  Of  all  the  main  forms  into  which  the 
literary  impulse  moulds  the  stuff  of  imagination, 
the  novel  is  the  last  to  be  devised.  The  drama 
dates  from  prehistoric  times,  so  do  the  epic, 
the  ballad  and  the  lyric.  The  novel,  as  we  know 
it,  dates  practically  speaking  from  1740.  What 
is  the  reason  it  is  so  late  in  appearing? 

The  answer  is  simply  that  there  seems  no 
room  for  good  drama  and  good  fiction  at  the 
same  time  in  literature;  drama  and  novels 
cannot  exist  side  by  side,  and  the  novel  had  to 
wait  for  the  decadence  of  the  drama  before  it 
could  appear  and  triumph.  If  one  were  to 
make  a  table  of  succession  for  the  various  kinds 
of  literature  as  they  have  been  used  naturally 


THE  NOVEL  213 

and  spontaneously  (not  academically),  the  order 
would  be  the  epic,  the  drama,  the  novel;  and 
it  would  be  obvious  at  once  that  the  order  stood 
for  something  more  than  chronological  succes- 
sion, and  that  literature  in  its  function  as  a 
representation  and  criticism  of  life  passed  from 
form  to  form  in  the  search  of  greater  freedom, 
greater  subtlety,  and  greater  power.  At  present 
we  seem  to  be  at  the  climax  of  the  third  stage 
in  this  development;  there  are  signs  that  the 
fourth  is  on  the  way,  and  that  it  will  be  a  return 
to  drama,  not  to  the  old,  formal,  ordered  kind, 
but,  something  new  and  freer,  ready  to  gather  up 
and  interpret  what  there  is  of  newness  and 
freedom  in  the  spirit  of  man  and  the  society  in 
which  he  lives. 

The  novel,  then,  had  to  wait  for  the  drama's 
decline,  but  there  was  literary  story-telling  long 
before  that.  There  were  mediaeval  romances 
in  prose  and  verse;  Renaissance  pastoral  tales, 
and  stories  of  adventure;  collections,  plenty 
of  them,  of  short  stories  like  Boccaccio's,  and 
those  in  Painter's  Palace  of  Pleasure.  But  none 
of  these,  not  even  romances  which  deal  in  moral 
and  sententious  advice  hke  Ewphues,  approach 
the  essence  of  the  novel  as  we  know  it.  They 
are  all  (except  Ewphues,  which  is  simply  a  frame- 
work of  travel  for  a  book  of  aphorisms)  simple 
and  objective;  they  set  forth  incidents  or  series 
of  incidents;  long  or  short  they  are  anecdotes 
only — they  take  no  account  of  character.  It  was 
impossible  we  should  have  the  novel  as  distinct 
from  the  tale,  till  stories  acquired  a  subjective 
interest  for  us;    till  we  began  to  think  about 


214    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

character  and  to  look  at  actions  not  only  out- 
wardly, but  within  at  their  springs. 

As  has  been  stated  early  in  this  book,  it  was 
in  the  seventeenth  century  that  this  interest  in 
character  was  first  wakened.  Shakespeare  had 
brought  to  the  drama,  which  before  him  was 
concerned  with  actions  viewed  outwardly,  a  psy- 
chological interest;  he  had  taught  that  "char- 
acter is  destiny,"  and  that  men's  actions  and 
fates  spring  not  from  outward  agencies,  but 
from  within  in  their  own  souls.  The  age  began 
to  take  a  deep  and  curious  interest  in  men's 
lives;  biography  was  written  for  the  first  time 
and  autobiography;  it  is  the  great  period  of 
memoir- writing  both  in  England  and  France; 
authors  like  Robert  Burton  came,  whose  delight 
it  was  to  dig  down  into  human  nature  in  search 
for  oddities  and  individualities  of  disposition; 
humanity  as  the  great  subject  of  enquiry  for 
all  men,  came  to  its  own.  All  this  has  a  direct 
bearing  on  the  birth  of  the  novel.  One  tran- 
sient form  of  literature  in  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury— the  Character — is  an  ancestor  in  the 
direct  line.  The  collections  of  them — Earle's 
Microcosmography  is  the  best — are  not  very 
exciting  reading,  and  they  never  perhaps  quite 
succeed  in  naturalizing  a  form  borrowed  from 
the  later  age  of  Greece,  but  their  importance 
in  the  history  of  the  novel  to  come  is  clear. 
Take  them  and  add  them  to  the  story  of 
adventure — i.e.,  introduce  each  fresh  person  in 
your  plot  with  a  description  in  the  character 
form,  and  the  step  you  have  made  towards 
the  novel  is  enormous;    you  have  given  to  plot 


THE  NOVEL  215 

which  was  already  there,  the  added  interest  of 
character. 

That,  however,  was  not  quite  how  the  thing 
worked  in  actual  fact.  At  the  heels  of  the  "Char- 
acter" came  the  periodical  essay  of  Addison 
and  Steele.  Their  interest  in  contemporary 
types  was  of  the  same  quality  as  Earle's  or 
Hall's,  but  they  went  a  difiFerent  way  to  work. 
Where  these  compressed  and  cultivated  a  style 
which  was  staccato  and  epigrammatic,  huddling 
all  the  traits  of  their  subject  in  short  sharp  sen- 
tences that  follow  each  other  with  all  the  brevity 
and  curtness  of  items  in  a  prescription,  Addison 
and  Steele  observed  a  more  artistic  plan.  They 
made,  as  it  were,  the  prescription  up,  adding  one 
ingredient  after  another  slowly  as  the  mixture 
dissolved.  You  are  introduced  to  Sir  Roger 
de  Coverley,  and  to  a  number  of  other  typical 
people,  and  then  in  a  series  of  essays  which  if 
they  were  disengaged  from  their  setting  would 
be  to  all  intents  a  novel  and  a  fine  one,  you 
are  made  aware  one  by  one  of  different  traits  in 
his  character  and  those  of  his  friends,  each  trait 
generally  enshrined  in  an  incident  which  illus- 
trates it;  you  get  to  know  them,  that  is,  gradu- 
ally, as  you  would  in  real  life,  and  not  all  in  a 
breath,  in  a  series  of  compressed  statements, 
as  is  the  way  of  the  character  writers.  With  the 
Coverley  essays  in  the  Spectator,  the  novel 
in  one  of  its  forms — that  in  which  an  invisible 
and  all  knowing  narrator  tells  a  story  in  which 
some  one  else  whose  character  he  lays  bare  for 
us  is  the  hero — is  as  good  as  achieved. 

Another  manner  of  fiction — the  autobiograph- 


216    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

ical — had  already  been  invented.  It  grew  directly 
out  of  the  public  interest  in  autobiography,  and 
particularly  in  the  tales  of  their  voyages  which 
the  discoverers  wrote  and  published  on  their 
return  from  their  adventures.  Its  establishment 
in  literature  was  the  work  of  two  authors,  Bunyan 
and  Defoe.  The  books  of  Bunyan,  whether  they 
are  told  in  the  first  person  or  no,  are  and  were 
meant  to  be  autobiographical;  their  interest 
is  a  subjective  interest.  Here  is  a  man  who 
endeavours  to  interest  you,  not  in  the  charac- 
ter of  some  other  person  he  has  imagined  or 
observed,  but  in  himself.  His  treatment  of 
it  is  characteristic  of  the  awakening  talent 
for  fiction  of  his  time.  The  Pilgrim's  Progress 
is  begun  as  an  allegory,  and  so  continues  for  a 
little  space  till  the  story  takes  hold  of  the  author. 
When  it  does,  whether  he  knew  it  or  not,  alle- 
gory goes  to  the  winds.  But  the  autobiographical 
form  of  fiction  in  its  highest  art  is  the  creation 
of  Defoe.  He  told  stories  of  adventure,  inci- 
dents modelled  on  real  life  as  many  tellers  of 
tales  had  done  before  him,  but  to  the  form  as  he 
found  it  he  super-added  a  psychological  interest 
— the  interest  of  the  character  of  the  narrator. 
He  contrived  to  observe  in  his  writing  a  scrup- 
ulous and  realistic  fidelity  and  appropriateness 
to  the  conditions  in  which  the  story  was  to 
be  told.  We  learn  about  Crusoe's  island,  for 
instance,  gradually  just  as  Crusoe  learns  of  it 
himself,  though  the  author  is  careful  by  taking 
his  narrator  up  to  a  high  point  of  vantage  the 
day  after  his  arrival,  that  we  shall  learn  the 
essentials  of  it,  as  long  as  verisimilitude  is  not 


THE  NOVEL  217 

sacrificed,  as  soon  as  possible.  It  is  the  para- 
dox of  the  English  novel  that  these  our  earliest 
efforts  in  fiction  were  meant,  unlike  the  romances 
which  preceded  them,  to  pass  for  truth.  Defoe's 
Journal  of  the  Plague  Year  was  widely  taken  as 
literal  fact,  and  it  is  still  quoted  as  such  occa- 
sionally by  rash  though  reputable  historians.  So 
that  in  England  the  novel  began  with  realism 
as  it  has  culminated,  and  across  two  centuries 
Defoe  and  the  "naturalists"  join  hands.  Defoe, 
it  is  proper  also  in  this  place  to  notice,  fixed  the 
peculiar  form  of  the  historical  novel.  In  his 
Memoirs  of  a  Cavalier,  the  narrative  of  an  imagi- 
nary person's  adventures  in  a  historical  setting  is 
interspersed  with  the  entrance  of  actual  histor- 
ical personages,  exactly  the  method  of  historical 
romancing  which  was  brought  to  perfection  by 
Sir  Walter  Scott. 


(2) 

In  the  eighteenth  century  came  the  decline  of 
the  drama  for  which  the  novel  had  been  waiting. 
By  1660  the  romantic  drama  of  Elizabeth's  time 
was  dead;  the  comedy  of  the  Restoration  which 
followed,  witty  and  brilliant  though  it  was,  re- 
flected a  society  too  licentious  and  artificial  to 
secure  it  permanence;  by  the  time  of  Addison 
play-writing  had  fallen  to  journey-work,  and  the 
theatre  to  openly  expressed  contempt.  When 
Richardson  and  Fielding  pubHshed  their  novels 
there  was  nothing  to  compete  with  fiction  in 
the  popular  taste.     It   would  seem  as  though 


218    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

the  novel  had  been  waiting  for  this  favourable 
circumstance.  In  a  sudden  burst  of  prolific  in- 
ventiveness, which  can  be  paralleled  in  all  letters 
only  by  the  period  of  Marlowe  and  Shakespeare, 
masterpiece  after  masterpiece  poured  from  the 
press.  Within  two  generations,  besides  Richard- 
son and  Fielding  came  Sterne  and  Goldsmith 
and  Smollett  and  Fanny  Burney  in  naturalism, 
and  Horace  Walpole  and  Mrs.  Radcliffe  in  the 
new  way  of  romance.  Novels  by  minor  authors 
were  published  in  thousands  as  well.  The  novel, 
in  fact,  besides  being  the  occasion  of  literature 
of  the  highest  class,  attracted  by  its  lucrativeness 
that  under-current  of  journey-work  authorship 
which  had  hitherto  busied  itself  in  poetry  or 
plays.  Fiction  has  been  its  chief  occupation 
ever  since. 

Anything  like  a  detailed  criticism  or  even  a 
bare  narrative  of  this  voluminous  literature  is 
plainly  impossible  within  the  limits  of  a  single 
chapter.  Readers  must  go  for  it  to  books  on  the 
subject.  It  is  possible  here  merely  to  draw  atten- 
tion to  those  authors  to  whom  the  English  novel 
as  a  more  or  less  fixed  form  is  indebted  for  its 
peculiar  characteristics.  Foremost  amongst  these 
are  Richardson  and  Fielding;  after  them  there  is 
Walter  Scott.  After  him,  in  the  nineteenth 
century,  Dickens  and  Meredith  and  Mr.  Hardy; 
last  of  all  the  French  realists  and  the  new  school 
of  romance.  To  one  or  other  of  these  originals 
all  the  great  authors  in  the  long  list  of  English 
novelists  owe  their  method  and  their  choice  of 
subject-matter. 

With  Defoe   fiction  gained   verisimihtude,   it 


THE  NOVEL  219 

ceased  to  deal  with  the  incredible;  it  aimed  at 
exhibiting,  though  in  strange  and  memorable 
circumstances,  the  workings  of  the  ordinary 
mind.  It  is  Richardson's  main  claim  to  fame  that 
he  contrived  a  form  of  novel  which  exhibited 
an  ordinary  mind  working  in  normal  circum- 
stances, and  that  he  did  this  with  a  minute- 
ness which  till  then  had  never  been  thought  of 
and  has  not  since  been  surpassed.  His  talent 
is  very  exactly  a  microscopical  talent;  under  it 
the  common  stuff  of  life  separated  from  its 
surroundings  and  magnified  beyond  previous 
knowledge,  yields  strange  and  new  and  deeply 
interesting  sights.  He  carried  into  the  study  of 
character  which  had  begun  in  Addison  with  an 
eye  to  externals  and  eccentricities,  a  minute 
faculty  of  inspection  which  watched  and  recorded 
unconscious  mental  and  emotional  processes. 

To  do  this  he  employed  a  method  which 
was,  in  effect,  a  compromise  between  that  of 
the  autobiography,  and  that  of  the  tale  told  by 
an  invisible  narrator.  The  weakness  of  the 
autobiography  is  that  it  can  write  only  of  events 
within  the  knowledge  of  the  supposed  speaker, 
and  that  consequently  the  presentation  of  all 
but  one  of  the  characters  of  the  book  is  an  ex- 
ternal presentation.  We  know,  that  is,  of  Man 
Friday  only  what  Crusoe  could,  according  to 
realistic  appropriateness,  tell  us  about  him. 
We  do  not  know  what  he  thought  or  felt  within 
himself.  On  the  other  hand  the  method  of  in- 
visible narration  had  not  at  his  time  acquired 
the  faculty  which  it  possesses  now  of  doing 
Friday's   thinking  aloud  or  exposing  fully  the 


no    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

workings  of  his  mind.  So  that  Richardson, 
whose  interests  were  psychological,  whose  strength 
and  talent  lay  in  the  presentation  of  the  states 
of  mind  appropriate  to  situations  of  passion  or 
intrigue,  had  to  look  about  him  for  a  new  form, 
and  that  form  he  found  in  the  novel  of  letters. 
In  a  way,  if  the  end  of  a  novel  be  the  presenta- 
tion not  of  action,  but  of  the  springs  of  action; 
if  the  external  event  is  in  it  always  of  less  im- 
portance than  the  emotions  which  conditioned 
it,  and  the  emotions  which  it  set  working,  the 
novel  of  letters  is  the  supreme  manner  for  fiction. 
Consider  the  possibilities  of  it;  there  is  a  series 
of  events  in  which  A,  B,  and  C  are  concerned. 
Not  only  can  the  outward  events  be  narrated 
as  they  appeared  to  all  three  separately  by 
means  of  letters  from  each  to  another,  or  to  a 
fourth  party,  but  the  motives  of  each  and  the 
emotions  which  each  experiences  as  a  result  of 
the  actions  of  the  others  or  them  all,  can  be 
laid  bare.  No  other  method  can  wind  itself  so 
completely  into  the  psychological  intricacies  and 
recesses  which  lie  behind  every  event.  Yet  the 
form,  as  everybody  knows,  has  not  been  popu- 
lar; even  an  expert  novel-reader  could  hardly 
name  off-hand  more  than  two  or  three  examples 
of  it  since  Richardson's  day.  Why  is  this? 
Well,  chiefly  it  is  because  the  mass  of  novelists 
have  not  had  Richardson's  knowledge  of,  or 
interest  in,  the  psychological  under  side  of  life, 
and  those  who  have,  as,  amongst  the  moderns, 
Henry  James,  have  devised  out  of  the  convention 
of  the  invisible  narrator  a  method  by  which  they 
can   with   greater   economy   attain   in   practice 


THE  NOVEL  221 

fairly  good  results.  For  the  mere  narration  of 
action  in  which  the  study  of  character  plays 
a  subsidiary  part,  it  was,  of  course,  from  the 
beginning  impossible.  Scott  turned  aside  at  the 
height  of  his  power  to  try  it  in  "Redgauntlet"; 
he  never  made  a  second  attempt. 

For  Richardson's  purpose,  it  answered  admir- 
ably, and  he  used  it  with  supreme  effect.  Partic- 
ularly he  excelled  in  that  side  of  the  novelist's 
craft  which  has  ever  since  (whether  because  he 
started  it  or  not)  proved  the  subtlest  and  most 
attractive,  the  presentation  of  women.  Richard- 
son was  one  of  those  men  who  are  not  at  their 
ease  in  other  men's  society,  and  whom  other 
men,  to  put  it  plainly,  are  apt  to  regard  as  cox- 
combs and  fools.  But  he  had  a  genius  for  the 
friendship  and  confidence  of  women.  In  his 
youth  he  wrote  love-letters  for  them.  His  first 
novel  grew  out  of  a  plan  to  exhibit  in  a  series  of 
letters  the  quality  of  feminine  virtue,  and  in  its 
essence  (though  with  a  ludicrous,  and  so  to  speak 
"  kitchen-maidish "  misunderstanding  of  his  own 
sex)  adheres  to  the  plan.  His  second  novel, 
which  designs  to  set  up  a  model  man  against 
the  monster  of  iniquity  in  Pamela,  is  successful 
only  so  far  as  it  exhibits  the  thoughts  and  feel- 
ings of  the  heroine  whom  he  ultimately  marries. 
His  last,  Clarissa  Harlowe,  is  a  masterpiece  of 
sympathetic  divination  into  the  feminine  mind. 
Clarissa  is,  as  has  been  well  said,  the  "Eve  of 
fiction,  the  prototype  of  the  modern  heroine"; 
feminine  psychology  as  good  as  unknown  before 
(Shakespeare's  women  being  the  "Fridays"  of 
a   highly   inteUigent   Crusoe)    has   hardly   been 


222    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

brought  further  since.  But  Clarissa  is  more  than 
mere  psychology;  whether  she  represents  a  con- 
temporary tendency  or  whether  Richardson  made 
her  so,  she  starts  a  new  epoch.  "This,"  says 
Henley,  "is  perhaps  her  finest  virtue  as  it  is 
certainly  her  greatest  charm;  that  until  she  set 
the  example,  woman  in  literature  as  a  self-suffer- 
ing individuality,  as  an  existence  endowed  with 
equal  rights  to  independence — of  choice,  volition, 
action — with  man  had  not  begun  to  be."  She 
had  not  begun  to  be  it  in  hfe  either. 

What  Richardson  did  for  the  subtlest  part 
of  a  novelist's  business,  his  dealings  with  psy- 
chology, Fielding  did  for  the  most  necessary 
part  of  it,  the  telling  of  the  story.  Before  him 
hardly  any  story  had  been  told  well;  even  if  it 
had  been  plain  and  clear  as  in  Bunyan  and 
Defoe  it  had  lacked  the  emphasis,  the  fight  and 
shade  of  skilful  grouping.  On  the  "picaresque" 
(so  the  autobiographical  form  was  called  abroad) 
convention  of  a  journey  he  grafted  a  structure 
based  in  its  outline  on  the  form  of  the  ancient 
epic.  It  proved  extraordinarily  suitable  for  his 
purpose.  Not  only  did  it  make  it  easy  for  him 
to  lighten  his  narrative  with  excursions  in  a 
heightened  style,  burlesquing  his  origins,  but  it 
gave  him  at  once  the  right  attitude  to  his  material. 
He  told  his  story  as  one  who  knew  everything; 
could  tell  conversations  and  incidents  as  he  con- 
ceived them  happening,  with  no  violation  of 
credibility,  nor  any  strain  on  his  reader's  imag- 
ination; and  without  any  impropriety  could 
interpose  in  his  own  person,  pointing  things  to 
the  reader  which  might  have  escaped  his  atten- 


THE  NOVEL  223 

tion,  pointing  at  parallels  he  might  have  missed, 
laying  bare  the  irony  or  humour  beneath  a 
situation.  He  allowed  himself  digressions  and 
episodes,  told  separate  tales  in  the  middle  of  the 
action,  introduced,  as  in  Partridge's  visit  to  the 
theatre,  the  added  piquancy  of  topical  allusion; 
in  fact  he  did  anything  he  chose.  And  he  laid 
down  that  free  form  of  the  novel  which  is  char- 
acteristically English,  and  from  which,  in  its 
essence,  no  one  till  the  modern  realists  has  made 
a  serious  departure. 

In  the  matter  of  his  novels,  he  excels  by 
reason  of  a  Shakespearean  sense  of  character 
and  by  the  richness  and  rightness  of  his  faculty 
of  humour.  He  had  a  quick  eye  for  contem- 
porary types,  and  an  amazing  power  of  building 
out  of  them  men  and  women  whose  individu- 
ality is  full  and  rounded.  You  do  not  feel  as 
you  do  with  Richardson  that  his  fabric  is  spun 
silk-worm- wise  out  of  himself;  on  the  contrary 
you  know  it  to  be  the  fruit  of  a  gentle  and  ob- 
servant nature,  and  a  stock  of  fundamental 
human  sympathy.  His  gallery  of  portraits, 
Joseph  Andrews,  Parson  Adams,  Parson  TruUi- 
ber,  Jones,  Blifil,  Partridge,  Sophia  and  her 
father  and  all  the  rest  are  each  of  them  minute 
studies  of  separate  people;  they  live  and  move 
according  to  their  proper  natures;  they  are 
conceived  not  from  without  but  from  within. 
Both  Richardson  and  Fielding  were  conscious 
of  a  moral  intention;  but  where  Richardson  is 
sentimental,  vulgar,  and  moral  only  so  far  as 
it  is  moral  (as  in  Pamela),  to  inculcate  selling 
at  the  highest  price   or    (as   in   Grandison)    to 


224    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

avoid  temptations  which  never  come  in  your 
way,  Fielding's  morality  is  fresh  and  healthy, 
and  (though  not  quite  free  from  the  sentimen- 
tality of  scoundrelism)  at  bottom  sane  and  true. 
His  knowledge  of  the  world  kept  him  right. 
His  acquaintance  with  life  is  wide,  and  his 
insight  is  keen  and  deep.  His  taste  is  almost  as 
catholic  as  Shakespeare's  own,  and  the  life  he 
knew,  and  which  other  men  knew,  he  handles 
for  the  first  time  with  the  freedom  and  imagination 
of  an  artist. 

Each  of  the  two — Fielding  and  Richardson — 
had  his  host  of  followers.  Abroad  Richardson 
won  immediate  recognition;  in  France  Diderot 
went  so  far  as  to  compare  him  with  Homer  and 
Moses!  He  gave  the  first  impulse  to  modern 
French  fiction.  At  home,  less  happily,  he  set 
going  the  sentimental  school,  and  it  was  only 
when  that  had  passed  away  that — in  the  delicate 
and  subtle  character-study  of  Miss  Austen — his 
influence  comes  to  its  own.  Miss  Austen  carried 
a  step  further,  and  with  an  observation  which  was 
first  hand  and  seconded  by  intuitive  knowledge, 
Richardson's  analysis  of  the  feminine  mind, 
adding  to  it  a  delicate  and  finely  humorous 
feeling  for  character  in  both  sexes  which  was 
all  her  own.  Fielding's  imitators  (they  number 
each  in  his  own  way,  and  with  his  own  graces 
or  talent  added  his  rival  Smollett,  Sterne,  and 
Goldsmith)  kept  the  way  which  leads  to  Thack- 
eray and  Dickens — the  main  road  of  the  English 
Novel. 

That  road  was  widened  two  ways  by  Sir 
Walter  Scott.     The  historical  novel,  which  had 


THE  NOVEL  225 

been  before  his  day  either  an  essay  in  anach- 
ronism with  nothing  historical  in  it  but  the 
date,  or  a  laborious  and  uninspired  compilation 
of  antiquarian  research,  took  form  and  life  under 
his  hands.  His  wide  reading,  stored  as  it  was  in 
a  marvellously  retentive  memory,  gave  him  all 
the  background  he  needed  to  achieve  a  historical 
setting,  and  allowed  him  to  concentrate  his  at- 
tention on  the  actual  telling  of  his  story;  to 
which  his  genial  and  sympathetic  humanity  and 
his  quick  eye  for  character  gave  a  humorous 
depth  and  richness  that  was  all  his  own.  It  is 
not  surprising  that  he  made  the  historical  novel 
a  literary  vogue  all  over  Europe.  In  the  second 
place,  he  began  in  his  novels  of  Scottish  char- 
acter a  sympathetic  study  of  nationality.  He  is 
not,  perhaps,  a  fair  guide  to  contemporary  condi- 
tions; his  interests  were  too  romantic  and  too 
much  in  the  past  to  catch  the  rattle  of  the  looms 
that  caught  the  ear  of  Gait,  and  if  we  want  a 
picture  of  the  great  fact  of  modern  Scotland,  its 
industrialisation,  it  is  to  Gait  we  must  go.  But 
in  his  comprehension  of  the  essential  character 
of  the  people  he  has  no  rival;  in  it  his  historical 
sense  seconded  his  observation,  and  the  two  min- 
gling gave  us  the  pictures  whose  depth  of  colour 
and  truth  make  his  Scottish  novels.  Old  Mortality, 
The  Antiquary,  Redgauntlet,  the  greatest  things 
of  their  kind  in  literature. 


(3) 

The  peculiarly  national  style  of  fiction  founded 
by   Fielding   and   carried   on   by   his   followers 


226    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

reached  its  culminating  point  in  Vanity  Fair. 
In  it  the  reader  does  not  seem  to  be  simply 
present  at  the  unfolding  of  a  plot  the  end  of 
which  is  constantly  present  to  the  mind  of  the 
author  and  to  which  he  is  always  consciously 
working,  every  incident  having  a  bearing  on  the 
course  of  the  action;  rather  he  feels  himself  to 
be  the  spectator  of  a  piece  of  life  which  is  too 
large  and  complex  to  be  under  the  control  of  a 
creator,  which  moves  to  its  close  not  under  the 
impulsion  of  a  directing  hand,  but  independently 
impelled  by  causes  evolved  in  the  course  of  its 
happening.  With  this  added  complexity  goes  a 
more  frequent  interposition  of  the  author  in  his 
own  person — one  of  the  conventions  as  we  have 
seen  of  this  national  style,  Thackeray  is  present 
to  his  readers,  indeed,  not  as  the  manager  who 
pulls  the  strings  and  sets  the  puppets  in  motion, 
but  as  an  interpreter  who  directs  the  reader's 
attention  to  the  events  on  which  he  lays  stress, 
and  makes  them  a  starting-point  for  his  own 
moralising.  This  persistent  moralising — sham 
cynical,  real  sentimental — this  thumping  of  death- 
bed pillows  as  in  the  dreadful  case  of  Miss 
Crawley,  makes  Thackeray's  use  of  the  personal 
interposition  almost  less  effective  than  that  of 
any  other  novelist.  Already  while  he  was  doing 
it,  Dickens  had  conquered  the  public;  and  the 
English  novel  was  making  its  second  fresh  start. 
He  is  an  innovator  in  more  ways  than  one. 
In  the  first  place  he  is  the  earliest  novelist  to 
practise  a  conscious  artistry  of  plot.  The  Mys- 
tery of  Edwin  Drood  remains  mysterious,  but  those 
who  essay  to  conjecture  the  end  of  that  unfin- 


THE  NOVEL  227 

ished  story  have  at  last  the  surety  that  its  end, 
full  worked  out  in  all  its  details,  had  been  in  its 
author's  mind  before  he  set  pen  to  paper.  His 
imagination  was  as  diligent  and  as  disciplined 
as  his  pen.  Dickens'  practice  in  this  matter 
could  not  be  better  put  than  in  his  own  words, 
when  he  describes  himself  as  "in  the  first  stage 
of  a  new  book,  which  consists  in  going  round 
and  round  the  idea,  as  you  see  a  bird  in  his  cage 
go  about  and  about  his  sugar  before  he  touches 
it."  That  his  plots  are  always  highly  elabo- 
rated is  the  fruit  of  this  preliminary  disciplined 
exercise  of  thought.  The  method  is  familiar 
to  many  novelists  now;  Dickens  was  the  first 
to  put  it  into  practice.  In  the  second  place 
he  made  a  new  departure  by  his  frankly  ad- 
mitted didacticism  and  by  the  skill  with  which 
in  all  but  two  or  three  of  his  books — Bleak 
House,  perhaps,  and  Little  Dorrit — he  squared 
his  purpose  with  his  art.  Lastly  he  made  the 
discovery  which  has  made  him  immortal.  In 
him  for  the  first  time  the  English  novel  produced 
an  author  who  dug  down  into  the  masses  of  the 
people  for  his  subjects;  apprehended  them  in 
all  their  inexhaustible  character  and  humour  and 
pathos,  and  reproduced  them  with  a  lively  and 
loving  artistic  skill. 

Dickens  has,  of  course,  serious  faults.  In 
particular,  readers  emancipated  by  lapse  of 
time  from  the  enslavement  of  the  first  enthu- 
siasm, have  quarrelled  with  the  mawkishness 
and  sentimentahty  of  his  pathos,  and  with  the 
exaggeration  of  his  studies  of  character.  It  has 
been  said  of  him,  as  it  has  of  Thackeray,  that  he 


228    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

could  not  draw  a  "good  woman'*  and  that  Agnes 
Copperfield,  like  Amelia  Sedley,  is  a  very  doll- 
like type  of  person.  To  critics  of  this  kind  it 
may  be  retorted  that  though  "good"  and  "bad" 
are  categories  relevant  to  melodrama,  they  apply 
very  ill  to  serious  fiction,  and  that  indeed  to  the 
characters  of  any  of  the  novelists — the  Brontes, 
Mrs.  Gaskell  or  the  like — who  lay  bare  charac- 
ter with  fullness  and  intimacy,  they  could  not 
well  be  applied  at  all.  The  faultiness  of  them 
in  Dickens  is  less  than  in  Thackeray,  for  in 
Dickens  they  are  only  incident  to  the  scheme, 
which  lies  in  the  hero  (his  heroes  are  excellent) 
and  in  the  grotesque  characters,  whereas  in 
his  rival  they  are  in  the  theme  itself.  For  his 
pathos,  not  even  his  warmest  admirer  could 
perhaps  offer  a  satisfactory  case.  The  charge 
of  exaggeration  however  is  another  matter. 
To  the  person  who  complains  that  he  has  never 
met  Dick  Swiveller  or  Micawber  or  Mrs.  Gamp 
the  answer  is  simply  Turner's  to  the  sceptical 
critic  of  his  sunset,  "Don't  you  wish  you  could.'*" 
To  the  other,  who  objects  more  plausibly  to 
Dickens's  habit  of  attaching  to  each  of  his  char- 
acters some  label  which  is  either  so  much  flaunted 
all  through  that  you  cannot  see  the  character 
at  all  or  else  mysteriously  and  unaccountably 
disappears  when  the  story  begins  to  grip  the 
author,  Dickens  has  himself  offered  an  amusing 
and  convincing  defence.  In  the  preface  to  Pick- 
wick he  answers  those  who  criticised  the  novel 
on  the  ground  that  Pickwick  began  by  being 
purely  ludicrous  and  developed  into  a  serious 
and  sympathetic  individuality,  by  pointing    to 


THE  NOVEL  «29 

the  analogous  process  which  commonly  takes 
place  in  actual  human  relationships.  You  begin 
a  new  acquaintanceship  with  perhaps  not  very 
charitable  prepossessions;  these  later  a  deeper 
and  better  knowledge  removes,  and  where  you 
have  before  seen  an  idiosyncrasy  you  come  to 
love  a  character.  It  is  ingenious  and  it  helps 
to  explain  Mrs.  Nickleby,  the  Pecksniff  daugh- 
ters, and  many  another.  Whether  it  is  true  or 
not  (and  it  does  not  explain  the  faultiness  of 
such  pictures  as  Carker  and  his  kind)  there  can 
be  no  doubt  that  this  trick  in  Dickens  of  begin- 
ning with  a  salient  impression  and  working  out- 
ward to  a  fuller  conception  of  character  is  part 
at  least  of  the  reason  of  his  enormous  hold  upon 
his  readers.  No  man  leads  you  into  the  mazes 
of  his  invention  so  easily  and  with  such  a  per- 
suasive hand. 

The  great  novelists  who  were  writing  con- 
temporarily with  him — the  Brontes,  Mrs.  Gas- 
kell,  George  Eliot — it  is  impossible  to  deal  with 
here,  except  to  say  that  the  last  is  indisputably, 
because  of  her  inability  to  fuse  completely  art 
and  ethics,  inferior  to  Mrs.  Gaskell  or  to  either 
of  the  Bronte  sisters.  Nor  of  the  later  Victo- 
rians who  added  fresh  variety  to  the  national 
style  can  the  greatest,  Meredith,  be  more  than 
mentioned  for  the  exquisiteness  of  his  comic 
spirit  and  the  brave  gallery  of  English  men  and 
women  he  has  given  us  in  what  is,  perhaps,  funda- 
mentally the  most  English  thing  in  fiction  since 
Fielding  wrote.  For  our  purpose  Mr.  Hardy, 
though  he  is  a  less  brilUant  artist,  is  more  to 
the  point.    His  novels  brought  into  England  the 


230    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

contemporary  pessimism  of  Schopenhauer  and 
the  Russians,  and  found  a  home  for  it  among  the 
EngHsh  peasantry.  Convinced  that  in  the  upper 
classes  character  could  be  studied  and  portrayed 
only  subjectively  because  of  the  artificiality  of 
a  society  which  prevented  its  outlet  in  action, 
he  turned  to  the  peasantry  because  with  them 
conduct  is  the  direct  expression  of  the  inner 
life.  Character  could  be  shown  working,  there- 
fore, not  subjectively  but  in  the  act,  if  you  chose 
a  peasant  subject.  His  philosophy,  expressed 
in  this  medium,  is  sombre.  In  his  novels  you 
can  trace  a  gradual  realization  of  the  defects 
of  natural  laws  and  the  quandary  men  are  put 
to  by  their  operation.  Chance,  an  irritating  and 
trifling  series  of  coincidences,  plays  the  part  of 
fate.  Nature  seems  to  enter  with  the  hopeless- 
ness of  man's  mood.  Finally  the  novelist  turns 
against  life  itself.  "Birth,"  he  says,  speaking 
of  Tess,  "seemed  to  her  an  ordeal  of  degrading 
personal  compulsion  whose  gratuitousness  noth- 
ing in  the  result  seemed  to  justify  and  at  best 
could  only  palliate."  It  is  strange  to  find  pessi- 
mism in  a  romantic  setting;  strange,  too,  to  find 
a  paganism  which  is  so  little  capable  of  light 
or  joy. 

(4) 

The  characteristic  form  of  English  fiction, 
that  in  which  the  requisite  illusion  of  the  com- 
plexity and  variety  of  life  is  rendered  by  discur- 
siveness, by  an  author's  licence  to  digress,  to 
double  back  on  himself,  to  start  may  be  in  the 


THE  NOVEL  231 

middle  of  a  story  and  work  subsequently  to  the 
beginning  and  the  end;  in  short  by  his  power  to 
do  whatever  is  most  expressive  of  his  individuality, 
found  a  rival  in  the  last  twenty  years  of  the 
nineteenth  century  in  the  French  Naturalistic 
or  Realist  school,  in  which  the  illusion  of  life 
is  got  by  a  studied  and  sober  veracity  of  state- 
ment, and  by  the  minute  accumulation  of  detail. 
To  the  French  Naturalists  a  novel  approached  in 
importance  the  work  of  a  man  of  science,  and  they 
believed  it  ought  to  be  based  on  documentary 
evidence,  as  a  scientific  work  would  be.  Above 
all  it  ought  not  to  allow  itself  to  be  coloured  by 
the  least  gloss  of  imagination  or  idealism;  it 
ought  never  to  shrink  from  a  confrontation 
of  the  naked  fact.  On  the  contrary  it  was  its 
business  to  carry  it  to  the  dissecting  table  and 
there  minutely  examine  everything  that  lay  be- 
neath its  surface. 

The  school  first  became  an  English  possession 
in  the  early  translations  of  the  work  of  Zola; 
its  methods  were  transplanted  into  English  fic- 
tion by  Mr.  George  Moore.  From  his  novels, 
both  in  passages  of  direct  statement  and  in  the 
light  of  his  practice,  it  is  possible  to  gather  together 
the  materials  of  a  manifesto  of  the  English 
Naturalistic  school.  The  naturalists  complained 
that  English  fiction  lacked  construction  in  the 
strictest  sense;  they  found  in  the  English  novel 
a  remarkable  absence  of  organic  wholeness;  it 
did  not  fulfil  their  first  and  broadest  canon  of 
subject-matter — by  which  a  novel  has  to  deal  in 
the  first  place  with  a  single  and  rhythmical  series 
of  events;    it  was  too  discursive.     They  made 


232    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

this  charge  against  English  fiction;  they  also 
retorted  the  charge  brought  by  native  writers 
and  their  readers  against  the  French  of  foulness, 
sordidness  and  pessimism  in  their  view  of  life. 
"We  do  not,"  says  a  novelist  in  one  of  Mr. 
Moore's  books,  "we  do  not  always  choose  what 
you  call  unpleasant  subjects,  but  we  do  try  to 
get  to  the  roots  of  things;  and  the  basis  of  life 
being  material  and  not  spiritual,  the  analyst  sooner 
or  later  finds  himself  invariably  handling  what 
this  sentimental  age  calls  coarse."  "The  novel," 
says  the  same  character,  "if  it  be  anything  is 
contemporary  history,  an  exact  and  complete 
reproduction  of  the  social  surroundings  of  the 
age  we  live  in."  That  succinctly  is  the  natural- 
istic theory  of  the  novel  as  a  work  of  science 
— that  as  the  history  of  a  nation  lies  hidden 
often  in  social  wrongs  and  in  domestic  grief 
as  much  as  in  the  movements  of  parties  or  dynas- 
ties, the  novelist  must  do  for  the  former  what 
the  historian  does  for  the  latter.  It  is  his  busi- 
ness in  the  scheme  of  knowledge  of  his  time. 

But  the  naturalists  believed  quite  as  profoundly 
in  the  novel  as  a  work  of  art.  They  claimed  for 
their  careful  pictures  of  the  grey  and  sad  and 
sordid  an  artistic  worth,  varying  in  proportion 
to  the  intensity  of  the  emotion  in  which  the 
picture  was  composed  and  according  to  the 
picture's  truth,  but  in  its  essence  just  as  real  and 
permanent  as  the  artistic  worth  of  romance. 
"Seen  from  afar,"  writes  Mr.  Moore,  "all  things 
in  nature  are  of  equal  worth;  and  the  meanest 
things,  when  viewed  with  the  eyes  of  God,  are 
raised  to  heights  of  tragic  awe  which  convention- 


THE  NOVEL  233 

ality  would  limit  to  the  deaths  of  kings  and 
patriots."  On  such  a  lofty  theory  they  built 
their  treatment  and  their  style.  It  is  a  mistake 
to  suppose  that  the  realist  school  deliberately 
cultivates  the  sordid  or  shocking.  Examine  in 
this  connection  Mr.  Moore's  Mummer's  Wife, 
our  greatest  English  realist  novel,  and  for  the 
matter  of  that  one  of  the  supreme  things  in 
English  fiction,  and  you  will  see  that  the  scrupu- 
lous fideUty  of  the  author's  method,  though  it 
denies  him  those  concessions  to  a  sentimentalist 
or  romantic  view  of  life  which  are  the  common 
implements  of  fiction,  denies  him  no  less  the 
extremities  of  horror  or  loathsomeness.  The 
heroine  sinks  into  the  miserable  squalor  of  a 
dipsomaniac  and  dies  from  a  drunkard's  disease, 
but  her  end  is  shown  as  the  ineluctable  conse- 
quence of  her  life,  its  early  greyness  and  mo- 
notony, the  sudden  shock  of  a  new  and  strange 
environment  and  the  resultant  weakness  of  will 
which  a  morbid  excitability  inevitably  brought 
about.  The  novel,  that  is  to  say,  deals  with  a 
"rhythmical  series  of  events  and  follows  them 
to  their  conclusion";  it  gets  at  the  roots  of 
things;  it  tells  us  of  something  which  we  know 
to  be  true  in  life  whether  we  care  to  read  it  in 
fiction  or  not.  There  is  nothing  in  it  of  sordid- 
ness  for  sordidness'  sake  nor  have  the  real^ts 
any  philosophy  of  an  unhappy  ending.  In  this 
case  the  ending  is  unhappy  because  the  sequence 
of  events  admitted  of  no  other  solution;  in 
others  the  ending  is  happy  or  merely  neutral  as 
the  preceding  story  decides.  If  what  one  may 
call  neutral  endings   predominate,  it  is  because 


234    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

they  also — ^notoriously — predominate  in  life.  But 
the  question  of  unhappiness  or  its  opposite 
has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the  larger 
matter  of  beauty;  it  is  the  triumph  of  the 
realists  that  at  their  best  they  discovered  a 
new  beauty  in  things,  the  loveliness  that  lies 
in  obscure  places,  the  splendour  of  sordidness, 
humility,  and  pain.  They  have  taught  us  that 
beauty,  like  the  Spirit,  blows  where  it  lists  and 
we  know  from  them  that  the  antithesis  between 
realism  and  idealism  is  only  on  their  lower  levels; 
at  their  summits  they  unite  and  are  one.  No 
true  realist  but  is  an  idealist  too. 

Most  of  what  is  best  in  English  fiction  since 
has  been  directly  occasioned  by  their  work; 
Gissing  and  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  may  be  men- 
tioned as  two  authors  who  are  fundamentally 
realist  in  their  conception  of  the  art  of  the  novel, 
and  the  realist  ideal  partakes  in  a  greater  or 
less  degree  in  the  work  of  nearly  all  our  eminent 
novelists  to-day.  But  realism  is  not  and  cannot 
be  interesting  to  the  great  public;  it  portrays 
people  as  they  are,  not  as  they  would  like  to 
be,  and  where  they  are,  not  where  they  would 
like  to  be.  It  gives  no  background  for  day- 
dreaming. Now  literature  (to  repeat  what 
has  been  more  than  once  stated  earlier  in  this 
book)  is  a  way  of  escape  from  life  as  well  as 
an  echo  or  mirror  of  it,  and  the  novel  as  the 
form  of  literature  which  more  than  any  other 
men  read  for  pleasure,  is  the  main  avenue  for 
this  escape.  So  that  alongside  this  invasion  of 
realism  it  is  not  strange  that  there  grew  a  revival 
in  romance. 


THE  NOVEL  235 

The  main  agent  of  it,  Robert  Louis  Steven- 
son, had  the  romantic  strain  in  him  intensified 
by  the  conditions  under  which  he  worked;  a 
weak  and  anaemic  man,  he  loved  bloodshed 
as  a  cripple  loves  athletics — passionately  and 
with  the  intimate  enthusiasm  of  make-believe 
which  an  imaginative  man  can  bring  to  bear 
on  the  contemplation  of  what  can  never  be 
his.  His  natural  attraction  for  "redness  and 
juice"  in  life  was  seconded  by  a  delightful  and 
fantastic  sense  of  the  boundless  possibilities 
of  romance  in  e very-day  things.  To  a  realist 
a  hansom-cab  driver  is  a  man  who  makes  twenty- 
five  shillings  a  week,  lives  in  a  back  street  in 
Pimlico,  has  a  wife  who  drinks  and  children 
who  grow  up  with  an  alcoholic  taint;  the  realist 
will  compare  his  lot  with  other  cab-drivers, 
and  find  what  part  of  his  life  is  the  product  of 
the  cab-driving  environment,  and  on  that  basis 
he  will  write  his  book.  To  Stevenson  and  to 
the  romanticist  generally,  a  hansom  cab-driver 
is  a  mystery  behind  whose  apparent  common- 
placeness  lie  magic  possibilities  beyond  all  tell- 
ing; not  one  but  may  be  the  agent  of  the  Prince 
of  Bohemia,  ready  to  drive  you  off  to  some 
mad  and  magic  adventure  in  a  street  which 
is  just  as  commonplace  to  the  outward  eye  as 
the  cab-driver  himself,  but  which  implicates 
by  its  very  deceitful  commonness  whole  volumes 
of  romance.  The  novel-reader  to  whom  Demos 
was  the  repetition  of  what  he  had  seen  and 
known,  and  what  had  planted  sickness  in  his 
soul,  found  the  New  Arabian  Nights  a  refreshing 
miracle.    Stevenson  had  discovered  that  modern 


236    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

London  had  its  possibilities  of  romance.  To 
these  two  elements  of  his  romantic  equipment 
must  be  added  a  third — travel.  Defoe  never 
left  England,  and  other  early  romanticists  less 
gifted  with  invention  than  he  wrote  from  the 
mind's  eye  and  from  books.  To  Stevenson, 
and  to  his  successor  Mr.  Kipling,  whose  "dis- 
covery" of  India  is  one  of  the  salient  facts  of 
modern  English  letters,  and  to  Mr.  Conrad 
belongs  the  credit  of  teaching  novelists  to  draw 
on  experience  for  the  scenes  they  seek  to  present. 
A  fourth  element  in  the  equipment  of  modern 
romanticism — that  which  draws  its  effects  from 
the  "miracles"  of  modern  science,  has  been 
added  since  by  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  in  whose  latest 
work  the  realistic  and  romantic  schools  seem  to 
have  united. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  PRESENT  AGE 

We  have  carried  our  study  down  to  the  death 
of  Ruskin  and  included  in  it  authors  like  Swin- 
burne and  Meredith  who  survived  till  recently; 
and  in  discussing  the  novel  we  have  included 
men  like  Kipling  and  Hardy — living  authors. 
It  would  be  possible  and  perhaps  safer  to  stop 
there  and  make  no  attempt  to  bring  writers 
later  than  these  into  our  survey.  To  do  so  is 
to  court  an  easily  and  quickly  stated  objection. 


THE  PRESENT  AGE  237 

One  is  anticipating  the  verdict  of  posterity. 
How  can  we  who  are  contemporaries  tell  whether 
an  author's  work  is  permanent  or  no? 

Of  course,  in  a  sense  the  point  of  view  ex- 
pressed by  these  questions  is  true  enough.  It 
is  always  idle  to  anticipate  the  verdict  of  pos- 
terity. Remember  Matthew  Arnold's  prophecy 
that  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  Words- 
worth and  Byron  would  be  the  two  great  names 
in  Romantic  poetry.  We  are  ten  years  and 
more  past  that  date  now,  and  so  far  as  Byron 
is  concerned,  at  any  rate,  there  is  no  sign  that 
Arnold's  prediction  has  come  true.  But  the 
obvious  fact  that  we  cannot  do  our  grand- 
children's thinking  for  them,  is  no  reason  why 
we  should  refuse  to  think  for  ourselves.  No 
notion  is  so  destructive  to  the  formation  of  a 
sound  literary  taste  as  the  notion  that  books 
become  literature  only  when  their  authors  are 
dead.  Round  us  men  and  women  are  putting 
into  plays  and  poetry  and  novels  the  best  that 
they  can  or  know.  They  are  writing  not  for 
a  dim  and  uncertain  future  but  for  us,  and 
on  our  recognition  and  welcome  they  depend, 
sometimes  for  their  livelihood,  always  for  the 
courage  which  carries  them  on  to  fresh  endeavour. 
Literature  is  an  ever-living  and  continuous  thing, 
and  we  do  it  less  than  its  due  service  if  we  are 
so  occupied  reading  Shakespeare  and  Milton  and 
Scott  that  we  have  no  time  to  read  Mr.  Yeats, 
Mr.  Shaw  or  Mr.  Wells.  Students  of  literature 
must  remember  that  classics  are  being  manu- 
factured daily  under  their  eyes,  and  that  on  their 
sympathy  and  comprehension  depends  whether 


238    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

an  author  receives  the  success  he  merits  when 
he  is  aUve  to  enjoy  it. 

The  purpose  of  this  chapter,  then,  is  to  draw 
a  rough  picture  of  some  of  the  lines  or  schools 
of  contemporary  writing — of  the  writing  mainly, 
though  not  altogether,  of  living  authors.  It 
is  intended  to  indicate  some  characteristics  of 
the  general  trend  or  drift  of  literary  effort  as  a 
whole.  The  most  remarkable  feature  of  the  age, 
as  far  as  writing  is  concerned,  is  without  doubt 
its  inattention  to  poetry.  Tennyson  was  a 
popular  author;  his  books  sold  in  thousands; 
his  lines  passed  into  that  common  conversa- 
tional currency  of  unconscious  quotation  which 
is  the  surest  testimony  to  the  permeation  of  a 
poet's  influence.  Even  Browning,  though  his 
popularity  came  late,  found  himself  carried 
into  all  the  nooks  and  corners  of  the  reading 
public.  His  robust  and  masculine  morality, 
understood  at  last,  or  expounded  by  a  semi- 
priestly  class  of  interpreters,  made  him  popular 
with  those  readers — and  they  are  the  majority — 
who  love  their  reading  to  convey  a  moral  lesson, 
just  as  Tennyson's  reflection  of  his  time's  dis- 
traction between  science  and  religion  endeared 
them  to  those  who  found  in  him  an  answer 
or  at  least  an  echo  to  their  own  perplexities. 
A  work  widely  different  from  either  of  these, 
Fitzgerald's  Rubaiyat  of  Omar  Khayyam,  shared 
and  has  probably  exceeded  their  popularity  for 
similar  reasons.  Its  easy  pessimism  and  cult 
of  pleasure,  its  delightful  freedom  from  any 
demand  for  continuous  thought  from  its  readers, 
its  appeal  to  the  indolence  and  moral  flaccidity 


THE  PRESENT  AGE  239 

which  is  implicit  in  all  men,  all  contributed 
to  its  immense  vogue;  and  among  people  who 
perhaps  did  not  fully  understand  it  but  were 
merely  lulled  by  its  sonorousness,  a  knowledge 
of  it  has  passed  for  the  insignia  of  a  love  of 
literature  and  the  possession  of  literary  taste. 
But  after  Fitzgerald — who?  What  poet  has 
commanded  the  ear  of  the  reading  public  or 
even  a  fraction  of  it?  Not  Swinburne  certainly, 
partly  because  of  his  undoubted  difficulty,  partly 
because  of  a  suspicion  held  of  his  moral  and 
religious  tenets,  largely  from  material  reasons 
quite  unconnected  with  the  quality  of  his  work; 
not  Morris,  nor  his  followers;  none  of  the  so- 
called  minor  poets  whom  we  shall  notice  presently 
— poets  who  have  drawn  the  moods  that  have 
nourished  their  work  from  the  decadents  of 
France.  Probably  the  only  writer  of  verse  who 
is  at  the  same  time  a  poet  and  has  acquired 
a  large  popularity  and  public  influence  is  Mr. 
Kipling.  His  work  as  a  novelist  we  mentioned 
in  the  last  chapter.  It  remains  to  say  something 
of  his  achievements  in  verse. 

Let  us  grant  at  once  his  faults.  He  can  be 
violent,  and  over-rhetorical;  he  belabours  you 
with  sense  impressions,  and  with  the  polysyl- 
labic rhetoric  he  learned  from  Swinburne — and 
(though  this  is  not  the  place  for  a  discussion 
of  political  ideas)  he  can  offend  by  the  sentimental 
brutalism  which  too  often  passes  for  patriotism 
in  his  poetry.  Not  that  this  last  represents  the 
total  impression  of  his  attitude  as  an  English- 
man. His  later  work  in  poetry  and  prose,  devoted 
to  the  reconstruction  of  English  history,  is  re- 


240    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

markable  for  the  justness  and  saneness  of  its 
temper.  There  are  other  faults — a  lack  of  sure- 
ness  in  taste  is  one — that  could  be  mentioned 
but  they  do  not  affect  the  main  greatness  of  his 
work.  He  is  great  because  he  discovered  a 
new  subject-matter,  and  because  of  the  white 
heat  of  imagination  which  in  his  best  things 
be  brought  to  bear  on  it  and  by  which  he  trans- 
posed it  into  poetry.  It  is  Mr.  Kipling's  special 
distinction  that  the  apparatus  of  modern  civili- 
zation— steam  engines,  and  steamships,  and  tele- 
graph lines,  and  the  art  of  flight — take  on  in 
his  hands  a  poetic  quality  as  authentic  and  in- 
spiring as  any  that  ever  was  cast  over  the 
implements  of  other  and  what  the  mass  of  men 
believe  to  have  been  more  picturesque  days. 
Romance  is  in  the  present,  so  he  teaches  us,  not 
in  the  past,  and  we  do  it  wrong  to  leave  it  only 
the  territory  we  have  ourselves  discarded  in  the 
advance  of  the  race.  That  and  the  great  dis- 
covery of  India — an  India  misunderstood  for 
his  own  purposes  no  doubt,  but  still  the  first 
presentiment  of  an  essential  fact  in  our  modern 
history  as  a  people — give  him  the  hold  that  he 
has,  and  rightly,  over  the  minds  of  his  readers. 
It  is  in  a  territory  poles  apart  from  Mr.  Kip- 
ling's that  the  main  stream  of  romantic  poetry 
flows.  Apart  from  the  gravely  delicate  and 
scholarly  work  of  Mr.  Bridges,  and  the  poetry 
of  some  others  who  work  separately  away  from 
their  fellows,  English  romantic  poetry  has  con- 
centrated itself  into  one  chief  school — the  school 
of  the  "Celtic  Revival"  of  which  the  leader  is 
Mr.   W.   B.   Yeats.     Two  sources  went  to  its 


THE  PRESENT  AGE  £41 

making.  In  its  inception,  it  arose  out  of  a  group 
of  young  poets  who  worked  in  a  conscious  imi- 
tation of  the  methods  of  the  French  decadents; 
chiefly  of  Baudelaire  andVerlaine.  As  a  whole 
their  work  was  merely  imitative  and  not  very 
profound,  but  each  of  them — Ernest  Dowson 
and  Lionel  Johnson,  who  are  both  now  dead, 
and  others  who  are  still  living — produced  enough 
to  show  that  they  had  at  their  command  a  vein 
of  poetry  that  might  have  deepened  and  proved 
more  rich  had  they  gone  on  working  it.  One 
of  them,  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats,  by  his  birth  and  his 
reading  in  Irish  legend  and  folklore,  became 
possessed  of  a  subject-matter  denied  to  his 
fellows,  and  it  is  from  the  combination  of  the 
mood  of  the  decadents  with  the  dreaminess 
and  mystery  of  Celtic  tradition  and  romance 
— a  combination  which  came  to  pass  in  his 
poetry — that  the  Celtic  school  has  sprung.  In  a 
sense  it  has  added  to  the  territory  explored  by 
Coleridge  and  Scott  and  Morris  a  new  province. 
Only  nothing  could  be  further  from  the  objec- 
tivity of  these  men,  than  the  way  in  which  the 
Celtic  school  approaches  its  material.  Its  stories 
are  clear  to  itself,  it  may  be,  but  not  to  its  readers. 
Deirdre  and  Conchubar,  and  Angus  and  Maeve 
and  Dectora  and  all  the  shadowy  figures  in  them 
scarcely  become  embodied.  Their  lives  and 
deaths  and  loves  and  hates  are  only  a  scheme 
on  which  they  weave  a  delicate  and  dim  embroid- 
ery of  pure  poetry — of  love  and  death  and 
old  age  and  the  passing  of  beauty  and  all  the 
sorrows  that  have  been  since  the  world  began 
and  will  be  till  the  world  ends.    If  Mr.  Kipling 


242    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

is  of  the  earth  earthy,  if  the  clangour  and  rush 
of  the  world  is  in  everything  he  writes,  Mr. 
Yeats  and  his  school  live  consciously  sequestered 
and  withdrawn,  and  the  world  never  breaks 
in  on  their  ghostly  troubles  or  their  peace. 
Poetry  never  fails  to  relate  itself  to  its  age; 
if  it  is  not  with  it,  it  is  against  it;  it  is  never 
merely  indifferent.  The  poetry  of  these  men 
is  the  denial,  passionately  made,  of  everything 
the  world  prizes.  While  such  a  denial  is  sincere, 
as  in  the  best  of  them,  then  the  verses  they  make 
are  true  and  fine.  But  when  it  is  assumed,  as 
in  some  of  their  imitators,  then  the  work  they 
did  is  not  true  poetry. 

But  the  literary  characteristic  of  the  present 
age — the  one  which  is  most  likely  to  differentiate 
it  from  its  predecessor,  is  the  revival  of  the 
drama.  When  we  left  it  before  the  Common- 
wealth the  great  English  literary  school  of  play- 
writing — the  romantic  drama — was  already  dead. 
It  has  had  since  no  second  birth.  There  followed 
after  it  the  heroic  tragedy  of  Dryden  and  Shad- 
well — a  turgid,  declamatory  form  of  art  without 
importance — and  two  brilliant  comic  periods, 
the  earlier  and  greater  that  of  Congreve  and 
Wycherley,  the  later  more  sentimental  with  less 
art  and  vivacity,  that  of  Goldsmith  and  Sheri- 
dan. With  Sheridan  the  drama  as  a  literary 
force  died  a  second  time.  It  has  been  born  again 
only  in  our  own  day.  It  is,  of  course,  unnecessary 
to  point  out  that  the  writing  of  plays  did  not 
cease  in  the  interval;  it  never  does  cease.  The 
production  of  dramatic  journey-work  has  been 
continuous  since  the  re-opening  of  the  theatres 


THE  PRESENT  AGE  243 

in  1660,  and  it  is  carried  on  as  plentifully  as  ever 
at  this  present  time.  Only  side  by  side  with  it 
there  has  grown  up  a  new  literary  drama,  and 
gradually  the  main  stream  of  artistic  endeavour 
which  for  nearly  a  century  has  preoccupied  itself 
with  the  novel  almost  to  the  exclusion  of  other 
forms  of  art,  has  turned  back  to  the  stage  as  its 
channel  to  articulation  and  an  audience.  An 
influence  from  abroad  set  it  in  motion.  The  plays 
of  Ibsen — produced,  the  best  of  them,  in  the 
eighties  of  last  century — came  to  England  in 
the  nineties.  In  a  way,  perhaps,  they  were  mis- 
understood by  their  worshippers  hardly  less 
than  by  their  enemies,  but  all  excrescences  of 
enthusiasm  apart  they  taught  men  a  new  and 
freer  approach  to  moral  questions,  and  a  new 
and  freer  dramatic  technique.  Where  plays 
had  been  constructed  on  a  journeyman  plan 
evolved  by  Labiche  and  Sardou — mid-nineteenth 
century  writers  in  France — a  plan  delighting  in 
symmetry,  close-jointedness,  false  correspond- 
ences, an  impossible  use  of  coincidence,  and  a 
quite  unreal  complexity  and  elaboration,  they 
become  bolder  and  less  artificial,  more  close  to 
the  likelihoods  of  real  life.  The  gravity  of  the 
problems  with  which  they  set  themselves  to  deal 
heightened  their  influence.  In  England  men 
began  to  ask  themselves  whether  the  theatre 
here  too  could  not  be  made  an  avenue  towards 
the  discussion  of  living  diflficulties,  and  then  arose 
the  new  school  of  dramatists — of  whom  the 
first  and  most  remarkable  is  Mr.  George  Ber- 
nard Shaw.  In  his  earlier  plays  he  set  himself 
boldly  to  attack  established  conventions,   and 


244    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

to  ask  his  audiences  to  think  for  themselves. 
Arms  and  the  Man  dealt  a  blow  at  the  cheap 
romanticism  with  which  a  peace-living  public 
invests  the  profession  of  arms;  The  Devil's 
Disciple  was  a  shrewd  criticism  of  the  prepos- 
terous self-sacrifice  on  which  melodrama,  which 
is  the  most  popular  non-Uterary  form  of  play- 
writing,  is  commonly  based;  Mrs.  Warren's 
Profession  made  a  brave  and  plain-spoken  at- 
tempt to  drag  the  public  face  to  face  with  the 
nauseous  realities  of  prostitution;  Widowers* 
Houses  laid  bare  the  sordidness  of  a  Society  which 
bases  itself  on  the  exploitation  of  the  poor  for 
the  luxuries  of  the  rich.  It  took  Mr.  Shaw  close 
on  ten  years  to  persuade  even  the  mbderate 
number  of  men  and  women  who  make  up  a 
theatre  audience  that  his  plays  were  worth  listen- 
ing to.  But  before  his  final  success  came  he  had 
attained  a  substantial  popularity  with  the 
public  which  reads.  Possibly  his  early  failure 
on  the  stage — mainly  due  to  the  obstinacy  of 
playgoers  immersed  in  a  stock  tradition — was 
partly  due  also  to  his  failure  in  constructive 
power.  He  is  an  adept  at  tying  knots  and  im- 
patient of  unravelling  them;  his  third  acts 
are  apt  either  to  evaporate  in  talk  or  to  find 
some  unreal  and  unsatisfactory  solution  for  the 
complexity  he  has  created.  But  constructive 
weakness  aplart,  his  amazing  brilliance  and 
fecundity  of  dialogue  ought  to  have  given  him 
an  immediate  and  lasting  grip  of  the  stage. 
There  has  probably  never  been  a  dramatist  who 
could  invest  conversation  with  the  same  vivacity 
and   point,   the   same   combination   of   surprise 


THE  PRESENT  AGE  246 

and  inevitableness  that  distinguishes  his  best 
work. 

Alongside  of  Mr.  Shaw  more  immediately 
successful,  and  not  traceable  to  any  obvious 
influence,  English  or  foreign,  came  the  come- 
dies of  Oscar  Wilde.  For  a  parallel  to  their 
pure  delight  and  high  spirits,  and  to  the  ex- 
quisite wit  and  artifice  with  which  they  were 
constructed,  one  would  have  to  go  back  to  the 
dramatists  of  the  Restoration.  To  Congreve 
and  his  school,  indeed,  Wilde  belongs  rather 
than  to  any  later  period.  With  his  own  age  he 
had  little  in  common;  he  was  without  interest 
in  its  social  and  moral  problems;  when  he  ap- 
proved of  socialism  it  was  because  in  a  socialist 
state  the  artist  might  be  absolved  from  the  neces- 
sity of  carrying  a  living,  and  be  free  to  foUow 
his  art  imdisturbed.  He  loved  to  think  of  him- 
self as  symbolic,  but  all  he  symbolized  was  a 
fantasy  of  his  own  creating;  his  attitude  to  his 
age  was  decorative  and  withdrawn  rather  than 
representative.  He  was  the  licensed  jester  to 
society,  and  in  that  capacity  he  gave  us  his  plays. 
Mr.  Shaw  may  be  said  to  have  founded  a  school; 
at  any  rate  he  gave  the  start  to  Mr.  Galsworthy 
and  some  lesser  dramatists.  Wilde  founded  noth- 
ing, and  his  works  remain  as  complete  and  sep- 
arate as  those  of  the  earlier  artificial  dramatists 
of  two  centuries  before. 

Another  school  of  drama,  homogeneous  and 
quite  apart  from  the  rest,  remains.  We  have 
seen  how  the  "Celtic  Revival,"  as  the  Irish 
literary  movement  has  been  called  by  its  ad- 
mirers, gave  us  a  new  kind  of  romantic  poetry. 


246    ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

As  an  oflFshoot  from  it  there  came  into  being 
some  ten  years  ago  an  Irish  school  of  drama, 
drawing  its  inspiration  from  two  sources — the 
body  of  the  old  Irish  legends  and  the  highly 
individualized  and  richly-coloured  life  of  the 
Irish  peasants  in  the  mountains  of  Wicklow  and 
of  the  West,  a  life,  so  the  dramatists  believed, 
still  unspoiled  by  the  deepening  influences  of 
a  false  system  of  education  and  the  wear  and 
tear  of  a  civilization  whose  values  are  commer- 
cial and  not  spiritual  or  artistic.  The  school 
founded  its  own  theatre,  trained  its  own  actors, 
fashioned  its  own  modes  of  speech  (the  chief 
of  which  was  a  frank  restoration  of  rhythm  in 
the  speaking  of  verse  and  of  cadence  in  prose), 
and  having  all  these  things  it  produced  a  series 
of  plays  all  directed  to  its  special  ends,  and  all 
composed  and  written  with  a  special  fidelity 
to  country  life  as  it  has  been  preserved,  or  to  what 
it  conceived  to  be  the  spirit  of  Irish  folk-legend. 
It  reached  its  zenith  quickly,  and  as  far  as  the 
production  of  plays  is  concerned,  it  would  seem 
to  be  already  in  its  decline.  That  is  to  say, 
what  in  the  beginning  was  a  fresh  and  vivid 
inspiration  caught  direct  from  life  has  become 
a  pattern  whose  colours  and  shape  can  be  re- 
peated or  varied  by  lesser  writers  who  take 
their  teaching  from  the  original  discoverers. 
But  in  the  course  of  its  brief  and  striking  course 
it  produced  one  great  dramatist — a  writer  whom 
already  not  three  years  after  his  death,  men 
instinctively  class  with  the  masters  of  his  art. 

J.  M.  Synge,  in  the  earlier  years  of  his  man- 
hood,   lived    entirely    abroad,    leading    the    life 


THE  PRESENT  AGE  247 

of  a  wandering  scholar  from  city  to  city  and 
country  to  country  till  he  was  persuaded  to 
give  up  the  Continent  and  the  criticism  and 
imitation  of  French  literature,  to  return  to 
England,  and  to  go  and  live  on  the  Aran  Islands. 
From  that  time  till  his  death — some  ten  years 
— he  spent  a  large  part  of  each  year  amongst 
the  peasantry  of  the  desolate  Atlantic  coast 
and  wrote  the  plays  by  which  his  name  is  known. 
His  literary  output  was  not  large,  but  he  sup- 
plied the  Irish  dramatic  movement  with  exactly 
what  it  needed — a  vivid  contact  with  the  reali- 
ties of  life.  Not  that  he  was  a  mere  student 
or  transcriber  of  manners.  His  wandering  life 
among  many  peoples  and  his  study  of  classical 
French  and  German  literature  had  equipped 
him  as  perhaps  no  other  modern  dramatist 
has  been  equipped  with  an  imaginative  insight 
and  a  reach  of  perception  which  enabled  him  to 
give  universaUty  and  depth  to  his  pourtrayal 
of  the  peasant  types  around  him.  He  got  down 
to  the  great  elemental  forces  which  throb  and 
pulse  beneath  the  common  crises  of  everyday 
life  and  laid  them  bare,  not  as  ugly  and  hor- 
rible, but  with  a  sense  of  their  terror,  their 
beauty  and  their  strength.  His  earliest  play. 
The  Well  of  the  Saints,  treats  of  a  sorrow  that 
is  as  old  as  Helen  of  the  vanishing  of  beauty 
and  the  irony  of  fulfilled  desire.  The  great  reali- 
ties of  death  pass  through  the  Riders  to  the  Sea, 
till  the  language  takes  on  a  kind  of  simplicity 
as  of  written  words  shrivelling  up  in  a  flame. 
The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World  is  a  study  of 
character,  terrible  in  its  clarity,  but  never  losing 


248   ENGLISH  LITERATURE— MODERN 

the  savour  of  imagination  and  of  the  astringency 
and  saltness  that  was  characteristic  of  his  temper. 
He  had  at  his  command  an  instrument  of  in- 
comparable fineness  and  range  in  the  language 
which  he  fashioned  out  of  the  speech  of  the  com- 
mon people  amongst  whom  he  lived.  In  his 
dramatic  writings  this  language  took  on  a 
kind  of  rhj'^thm  which  had  the  effect  of  produc- 
ing a  certain  remoteness  of  the  highest  possible 
artistic  value.  The  people  of  his  imagination 
appear  a  little  disembodied.  They  talk  with 
that  straightforward  and  simple  kind  of  innocency 
which  makes  strange  and  impressive  the  dialogue 
of  Maeterlinck's  earlier  plays.  Through  it,  as 
Mr.  Yeats  has  said,  he  saw  the  subject-matter 
of  his  art  "with  wise,  clear-seeing,  unreflecting 
eyes — and  he  preserved  the  innocence  of  good 
art  in  an  age  of  reasons  and  purposes."  He 
had  no  theory  except  of  his  art;  no  "ideas" 
and  no  "problems";  he  did  not  wish  to  change 
anything  or  to  reform  anything;  but  he  saw  all 
his  people  pass  by  as  before  a  window,  and  he 
heard  their  words.  This  resolute  refusal  to  be 
interested  in  or  to  take  account  of  current  modes 
of  thought  has  been  considered  by  some  to  detract 
from  his  eminence.  Certainly  if  by  "ideas" 
we  mean  current  views  on  society  or  morality, 
he  is  deficient  in  them;  only  his  very  deficiency 
brings  him  nearer  to  the  great  masters  of  drama 
— to  Ben  Jonson,  to  Cervantes,  to  Moliere — 
even  to  Shakespeare  himself.  Probably  in  no 
single  case  amongst  our  contemporaries  could  a 
high  and  permanent  place  in  literature  be  proph- 
esied with  more  confidence  than  in  his. 


THE  PRESENT  AGE  249 

In  the  past  it  has  seemed  impossible  for  fiction 
and  the  drama,  i.e.  serious  drama  of  high  hterary 
quaUty,  to  flomdsh,  side  by  side.  It  seems  as 
though  the  best  creative  minds  in  any  age  could 
find  strength  for  any  one  of  these  two  great  out- 
lets for  the  activity  of  the  creative  imagination. 
In  the  reign  of  Ehzabeth  the  drama  outshone 
fiction;  in  the  reign  of  Victoria  the  novel  crowded 
out  the  drama.  There  are  signs  that  a  literary 
era  is  commencing,  in  which  the  drama  will  again 
regain  to  the  fidl  its  position  as  a  literature. 
More  and  more  the  bigger  creative  artists  will 
turn  to  a  form  which  by  its  economy  of  means 
to  ends,  and  the  chance  it  gives  not  merely  of 
observing  but  of  creating  and  displaying  char- 
acter in  action,  has  a  more  vigorous  principle  of 
life  in  it  than  its  rival. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


It  is  best  to  study  English  literature  one  period,  or,  even  in  the  case  of 
the  greatest,  one  author  at  a  time.  In  every  case  the  student  should 
see  to  it  that  he  knows  the  text  of  his  authors;  a  knowledge  of  what 
critics  have  said  about  our  poets  is  a  poor  substitute  for  a  knowledge 
of  what  they  have  said  themselves.  Poetry  ought  to  be  read  slowly 
and  carefully,  and  the  reader  ought  to  pay  his  author  the  compliment 
of  crediting  him  with  ideas  as  important  and,  on  occasion,  as  abstruse 
as  any  in  a  work  of  philosophy  or  abstract  science.  When  the  meaning 
is  mastered,  the  poem  ought  to  be  read  a  second  time  aloud  to  catch 
the  magic  of  the  language  and  the  verse.  The  reading  of  prose  presents 
less  difficulty,  but  there  again  the  rule  is,  never  allow  yoiu^elf  to  be 
lulled  by  sound.  Reading  is  an  intellectual  and  not  an  hypnotic 
exercise. 

The  following  short  bibliography  is  divided  to  correspond  with  the 
chapters  in  this  book.  Prices  and  publishers  are  mentioned  only  when 
there  is  no  more  than  one  cheap  edition,  of  a  book  known  to  the  author. 
For  the  subject  as  a  whole,  Chambers's  Cydopcedia  of  English  Literature 
(3  vols.,  lOs.  6d.  net  each),  which  contains  biographical  and  critical 
articles  on  all  authors,  arranged  chronologically  and  furnished  very 
copiously  with  specimen  parages,  may  be  consulted  at  any  library. 

•  The  books  with  an  asterisk  are  suggested  as  those  on  which  reading 
should  be  begun.  The  reader  can  then  proceed  to  the  others  and  after 
them  to  the  many  authors — great  authors — who  are  not  included  in 
this  short  list. 

Chapter  I. — ♦More's  Utopia;  HakluyVs  Voyages  (Ed.  J.  Masefield, 
Everyman's  Library,  8  vols.,  35  cts.  net  each).  North's  Transla- 
tion of  Plutarch's  Lives  (Temple  Classics) . 

Chapter  II. — Surrey's  and  Wyatt's  Poems  (Aldine  Edition.  G.  Bella 
&  Sons);  *Spenser's  Works,  Sidney's  Poems.  A  good  idea  of  the 
atmosphere  in  which  poetry  was  written  is  to  be  obtained  from 
Scott's  Kenilworth.     It  is  fiill  of  inaccuracy  in  detail. 

Chapter  III. — *The  dramatists  in  the  Mermaid  Series  (T.  Fisher 
Unwin) ;  *Everyman  and  other  Plays;  ed.  by  A.  W.  Pollard  (Every- 
man's Library). 

Chapter  IV. — ♦Bacon's  Essays;  Sir  Thomas  Browne's  Works;  ♦Mil- 
ton's Works;  ♦Poems  of  John  Donne  (Muses  Library,  Routledge); 
♦Poems  of  Robert  Herrick. 

Chapter  V. — ♦Poems  of  Dryden;  ♦Poems  of  Pope;  Poems  of  Thomson; 
*The  Spectator  (Routledge's  Universal  Library  or  Everyman's); 
♦Swift's  Gulliver's  Travels;  Defoe's  Novels. 

Chapter  VI. — ♦Boswell's  Life  of  Johnson;  *Burke  (in  selections); 
Goldsmith's  Citizen  of  the  World  (Temple  Classics);  ♦Bums' 
Poetical  Works;  ♦Poems  of  Blake  (Clarenclon  Press). 

251 


«52  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Chapter  VII. — *Word8worth  (Golden  Treasury  Series);  ♦Words- 
worth's Prelude  (Temple  Classics);  Coleridge's  Poems;  *Keat8's 
Poems;  *Shelley's  Poems;  *Byron  (Golden  Treasury  Series); 
*Lamb,  Essays  of  Elia;  Hazlitt  (volumes  of  Essays  in  World's 
Classics  Series). 

Chapter  VIII. — *Tennyson'8  Works;  *Browning's  Works;  Rossetti's 
Works; .  *Carlyle'3  Sartor  Resartus,  Past  and  Present,  and  French 
Revolution;  Ruskin's  Unto  this  Last,  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture; 
Arnold's  Poems;  Swinburne  (Selections). 

Chapter  IX. — *Fielding's  Tom  Jones;  Smollett,  Roderick  Random; 
♦Jane  Austen's  Persxmsion,  Pride  and  Prejudice,  and  Northanger 
Abbey  (as  a  parody  of  the  Radcliffe  School);  *Scott's  WaverUy, 
Antiquary,  Ivanhoe,  Old  Mortality,  Bride  of  Lammermoor.  It 
seems  hardly  necessary  to  give  a  selection  of  later  novels. 

Chapter  X. — W.  B.  Yeats'  Poems;  Wilde,  Importance  of  Being  Earnest; 
♦Synge,  Dramatic  Works. 

And  every  new  work  of  the  best  contemporary  authors. 

G.  H.  M. 


LIST  OF  THE  CHIEF  WORKS  AND 
AUTHORS  MENTIONED 


The  dates  attached  to  the  authors  are  those  of  birth  and  death;  those 
with  the  books,  of  publication. 


Chapter  I 
Sir  Thomas  More,  1480-1533. 

Utopia,  1516  (in  Latin). 
Willaim  Tindall,  1484-1536. 

Trannlation  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment, 1526. 
ffir  John  Cheke,  1514-1557. 
Roger  Ascham.  1515-1568. 

Toxophilus,  1545. 

Schoolmaster,  1570. 
Richard  Hakluyt,  1553-1616. 

His  Voyages,  1598. 

Chapter  II 
Sir  Thomas  Wyatt.  1503-1542. 
The  Earl  of  Surrey,  1517-1547. 

Tottel's    Miscellany  (containing 
their  poems),  1557. 
Sir  Philip  Sidney,  1554-1586. 

Arcadia,  1590. 

Astrophel  and  Stella,  1591. 
Edmund  Spen-ser,  1552-1599. 

Shepherd's  Calendar,  1579. 

Fairy  Queen,  1589,  1596. 
John  Lyly,  1554-1606. 

Euphues,  1579. 

Euphues  and  his  England,  1580. 
Richard  Hooker,  1553-1600. 

EccUsiaslical  Polity,  1594. 

Chapter  III 
Christopher  Marlowe,  1564-1593. 
Tamburlaine,  1587  (date  of  per- 
formance). 
Dr.  Faustus,  1588  (date  of  per- 
formance). 
Sdxoard  II.,  1593. 


Thomas    Kyd,    1557(?)-1595(?). 

The    Spanish     Tragedy,     1594 

(published). 

John   Webster,    1580(?)-1625(?). 

The  WhUe  Devil,  1608  (date  of 

performance). 
Duchess  of  Mal/i,  1616  (date  of 
performance). 
Ben  Jonson,  1573-1637. 

Every  Man  in  his  Humour,  1598. 
Volpone,  1605. 
Poems,  1616. 


Chapter  IV 
John  Donne,  1573-1631. 

Poems,    1633  {(first  published, 
but  known,  like  those  of  all 
Elizabethan  poets,  in  manu- 
script long  before). 
William  Browne,  1591-1643. 
George  Herbert,  1593-1633. 
Robert  Herrick,  1593-1674. 
Richard  Crashaw,  1613-1649. 
Francis  Bacon,  1561-1626. 

Advancement  of  Learning,  1605. 
Essays,  1625. 

The  Bible,  Authorized  Version, 
1611. 
Robert  Burton,  1577-1640. 

Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  1621. 
Sir  Thomas  Browne,  1605-1682. 

Religio  Medici,  1642. 

John  Bunyan,  1628-1688. 

Pilgrim's  Progress,  1678. 

John  Milton,  1608-1674. 

Paradise  Lost,  1667. 


253 


254 


LIST  OF  WORKS 


Paradise  Regained  and  Samson 
Agonistes,  1671. 

Chapter  V 
John  Dryden,  1631-1700. 

Absalom    and    Achitophel    and 
Religio  Laid,  1682. 

The  Hind  and  the  Panther,  1687. 
Alexander  Pope.  1688-1744. 

Essay  on  Criticism,  1711. 

Rape  of  the  Lock,  1714. 
James  Thomson,  1700-1748. 

The  Seasons,  1730. 
Daniel  Defoe,  1661-1731. 

Robinson  Crusoe,  1719. 
Jonathan  Swift,  1667-1745. 

The  Tale  of  the  Tub,  1704. 

Gulliver's  Travels,  1726. 
Joseph  Addison,  1672-1719. 
Richard  Steele,  1675-1729. 

The  Taller,  1709-1711. 

The  Spectator,  1711-1712. 

Chapter  VI 
Samuel  Johnson,  1709-1784. 
Edmund  Burke,  1728-1797. 
Oliver  Goldsmith,  1728-1774. 
Thomas  Gray,  1716-1771. 
William  Collins,  1721-1759. 
Robert  Burns,  1759-1796. 

Poems,  1786. 
William  Blake,  1757-1827. 

Songs  of  Innocence,  1789. 

Chapter  VII 
William  Wordsworth,  1770-1850. 
Lyrical  BaUadt,  1798, 


Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge,   1772- 

1834. 
Sir  Walter  Scott,  1771-1832. 
Lord  Byron,  1788-1824. 

Childe      Harold's     Pilgrimage, 
1812-1817. 
Percy  Bysshe  Shelley,  1792-1822. 
John  Keats,  1795-1821. 
Charles  Lamb,  177.5-1834. 

Essays  of  Elia,  1823. 
William  Hazlitt,  1778-1830. 
Thomas  de  Quincey,  1785-1859. 

Chapter  VIII 
Lord  Tennyson,  1809-1892. 

Poems,  1842. 

Idylls  of  the  King.  1859. 
Robert  Browning,  1812-18S9. 

Men  and  Women,  185.'). 

The  Ring  and  the  Book,  18G8. 
D.  G.  Rossetti,  1828-1882. 
William  Morris,  1834-1896. 
A.  C.  Swinburne,  1836-1909. 
Thomas  Cariyle,  1795-1880. 
John  Ruskin,  1819-1900. 

Chapter  IX 
Samuel  Richardson,  1689-1761. 

Pamela,  1740. 

Clarissa  ffarlowe,  1750. 
Henry  Fielding,  1707-1754. 

Joseph  Andrews,  1742. 

Tom  Jones,  1749. 
Jane  Austen,  1775-1817. 
William    Makepeace   Thackeray, 

1811-1863. 
Charles  Dickens,  1812-1870. 
George  Meredith,  1832-1909, 


INDEX 


Addison,  Joseph,  127,  136-137, 
186.  187,  215 

Advancement  of  Learning,  The, 
101.  102 

Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  The,  102, 
103 

Antonio  and  MeUida,  69 

Arcadia,  the  Countess  of  Pem- 
broke's. 39.  41,  54-56 

Arnold,  Matthew,  152,  205,  237 

Ascham,  Roger.  15,  22,  23 

Astrophel  and  Stella,  40,  41 

Atheist's  Tragedy,  The,  67,  71 

AugiiBtan  Age,  110,  111 

Austen.  Jane,  224,  225 

Autobiography,  83 

Bacon,  Francis,  97,  99-102 

Ballad,  the,  167,  168 

Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  73-75 

Bennett,  Arnold.  234 

Bible,  the.  97-99 

Biography,  82,  83 

Blake,  William,  158-161 

Blank  Verse,  36,  74 

Boswell.  James,  140,  142,  143,  150 

Brontes,  the,  229 

Browne,  Sir  Thomas,  103, 104, 187 

Browne.  William,  90 

Browning,    Robert,    92-94,    192, 

193,  201-204 
Bunyan,  John.  99.  216 
Burke,  Edmund.  99.  146-149,  170 
Bums,  Robert,  153-158 
Burton,  Robert,  102,  103,  187 
Byron,  Lord,  167,  184,  185 

Carew,  Thomas,  96 
Carlyle.  Thomas.  190,  207-211 
Celtic  Revival,  240-243,  245-249 
Character-writing,  83,  214 
Chatterton,  Thomas,  168 
Cheke,  Sir  John,  15.  18-20 
Christ's  Victory  and  Death,  90 
Classicism,  79,  110-119 
Clough,  Thomas,  205 
Coleridge,    Samuel   Taylor,    164, 

168.  180.  181 
Collins,  William.  151,  152 
Conrad.  Joseph.  236 
Cowley.  Abraham,  96 
Cowper.  William,  151 
Crabbe.  George.  151 
Crashaw,  Richard,  96 
Criticism,  82,  172-174 

Decadence,  73,  74 
Defoe,  Daniel,  29,  129-132,  216. 
217 


De  Qtiincey,  Thomas,  187-189 
Dekker,  Thomas,  70 
Dickens,  Charles,  226-229 
Discovery,  Voyages  of,  23-29,  31, 

70 
Disraeli,  Benjamin,  194 
Dr.  Pausltis,  27,  66 
Donne.John.  84. 92-95.96, 114, 115 
Drama,  the,  56-79,  83,  217,  218, 

242-249 
Dryden.  John,  115,  119-123, 128- 

129,  163 
Duchess  of  Malfi,  The,  72 

Earle,  John.  214 
Edtoard  II.,  67 
Elia,  Essays  of,  188,  189 
Eliot,  George,  229 
Elizabethan  Poetry,  30-47 
Elizabethan  Prose,  48-56 
Essays,  Civil  and  Moral,  100,  101 
Euphues,  51-54,  55,  213 
EveryTTian,  60 

Fairy  Queen,  The,  44-47,  87,  105 
Fantastics,  the,  96 
Fielding.  Henry.  222-224 
Fitzgerald.  Edward,  238 
Fletcher,  Giles,  90 
Fletcher,  Phineas,  85,  89 
Ford,  John,  75 

French  Revolution,  the,  146,  157- 
158,  170,  176,  177,  181 

Gaskell,  Mrs.  229 
Gibbon,  Edward,  151 
Gissing,  George,  234 
Goldsmith,  Oliver,  150,  151,  224 
Oorboduc,  64 

Gray,  Thomas,  151.  152,  167 
Greene.  Robert.  65 
Greville,  Sir  Fulke,  82 
GvMiver's  Travels,  133 

Hakluyt's  Voyages,  25 
Hardy,  Thomas,  229,  230 
Hawthorne.  Nathaniel.  87 
Hazlitt.  William,  187.  189 
Henry  VII.,  History  of,  101 
Herbert,  George,  84,  96 
Herrick.  Robert,  96 
Hobbes.  Thomas.  28 
Hooker,  Richard,  50 

Italy,  influence  of,  22,  23 

Jew  of  Malta,  67 

Johnson,    Samuel,    96,    137-146, 

151,  163.  165 
Jonson.  Ben,  31,  70,  75,  79,  91. 

92,  96,  99,  115 


255 


256 


INDEX 


Keats,  John,  90,  183,  184 
Kipling,  Rudyard,  32,  236,  239, 

240 
Kyd,  Thomas,  65.  68 

Lamb,  Charles,  103,  187-189 
Locke,  John,  28 
Lodge,  Thomas,  31 
Lyly,  John,  17,  51-64 
Lyric,  the,  37.  38 
Lyrical  Baliads,  164,  178 

Marlowe,  Christopher,  26,  27,  36, 

60,  63.  65-68 
Marston,  John,  69,  70 
Massinger,  Philip,  75 
Meredith,  George,  205.  229 
Middleton,  Thomas.  70 
Milton,  John.  19,  27,  36,  85,  87, 

104-109,  127 
Miracle  Play.  the.  67-60 
Moore.  George,  232-234 
MoraUty.  the,  60 
More,  Sir,  Thomas,  20,  21 
Morris.  William,  56,  166,  205 

New  Atlantis.  The,  20,  101 
Novel,  the,  212-236 

Obscurity  in  Poetry,  92-94 
Omar  Khayyam,  238 
Ossian,  167 
Oxford  Movement,  the,  195 

Paradise  Lost,  88,  105-107 
Pastoral   Prose  and  Poetry,  32, 

64,  55,88 
Peele,  George,  65 
Percy,  WiUiam,  166.  167,  168 
Pilgrim's  Progress,  216 
Platonism,  20,  21 
Poetic  Diction,  118.  163.  164 
Pope,  Alexander,  123-126. 151. 163 
Puritanism.  54,  59,  84.  86.  87,  89 
Purple  Island,  The,  85,  89 

Raleigh,  Sir  Walter,  32 
Rape  of  the  Lock,  125,  126 
Realism,  230-236 
Religio  Medici,  104 
Renaissance,    the,    9-14,    14-29, 

81,  105 
Reynolds.  Sir  Joshua,  139 
Rhetoric,  study  of,  16,  17.  115 
Richardson.  Samuel,  218-222 
Robinson  Crusoe,  29,  131,  216.  217 
Romanticism,  109-119.  165 
Romantic  Revival,  the,  112,  138, 

158,  159,  161-174 
Rossetti,  D.  G..  194.  205 
Boflkin.  John,  50.  99,  207 


Sackville,  Thomas,  M 

Satire,  84 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  168,  217,  221, 

224,  225 
Senecan  Tragedy,  64 
Seventeenth  Century,  the,  80-87 
Shaw,  G.  Bernard,  150.  243.  244 
Shelley,  P.  B.,  159,  182,  183 
Shenstone,  Thomas,  127 
Sheridan,  R.  B.,  242 
Shirley,  .Tohn,  75 
Sidney,  Sir  PhiUp,  31,  39-41,  54- 

56.  84 
Smollett,  T..  224 
Sonnet,  the,  35.  87.  88 
Sonneteers,  the.  37.  94 
Spanish  Tragedy,  The,  68,  69 
Spectator,  The,  136,  136.  215 
Spenser.  Edmund,  19,  41-48,  84, 

89.  104.  126.  127 
Spenseriaos.  the,  89-91 
Steele,    Richard,    135-137,    186, 

187.  216 
Sterne,  Lawrence,  224 
Stevenson.  R.  L..  32,  103,  154, 

236,  236 
Supernatural,  the.  171 
Surrey,  the  Eari  of.  33-36 
Swift.  Jonathan.  132-136 
Swinburne.  A.  C.  162.  205,  239 
Synge,  J.  M..  32.  246-249 

Tale  of  a  Tub,  The,  133,  134 
Tamburlaine,  27.  66 
Toiler,  The,  135 
Temple.  Sir  William.  132 
Tennyson,  Alfred.  194-201. 
Thackeray,  W.  M..  226.  227 
Theatre,  the  Elizabethan,  60-63 
Thomson.  James.  127.  128,  161 
ToUel'c  Miscellany,  33-36 

Utopia,  20,  21 
Vaughan,  Henry.  96 
Victorain  Age.  the,  190-195 
View  of  the  State  of  Ireland,  42 

Waller.  Edmund.  96,  116 
Walton,  Isaak.  83 
Webster.  John-J2,  73 
Wells,  H.  G.,  m 
WhUe  Devil,  The,  72 
Wilde,  Oscar.  43.  245 
Wilson.  Thomas.  15,  19 
Wither.  George.  90 
Wordsworth,  William.   164,  167, 

174-180.  190.  191,  192 
Wyatt.  Thomas.  33-35 
Yeat*.  W.  B..  241-242 


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